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Accenture would cut 19,000 jobs
- latentpot 4y agoThis is a company that bills it's sales team to clients indirectly. Wonder if they've automated/ ai-fied some of their mundane corporate functions and back office activities leading to this point.
- jon-wood 4y agoI highly doubt they've replaced internal functions with AI. They're probably just firing a bunch of people, and telling anyone left that they'll have to pick up the slack and to be thankful for still having a job.
- cleansy 4y agoEvery company is billing its sales team to the clients, no matter direct or indirectly?
- neogodless 4y agoFrom the Hacker News Guidelines: > Otherwise please use the original title, unless it is misleading or linkbait; don't editorialize.
- jwsteigerwalt 4y ago“Would” is not an appropriate word to use in a headline like this. “Will” or “may” are much more appropriate.
- foobarbecue 4y agoRight. Had me thinking "they would ... if what?" It implies a conditional. Edit: I see OP got this from the phrasing in the article "[Accenture] said on Thursday it would cut about 2.5% of its workforce..." . Not valid without the "they said."
- harperlee 4y agoAt least in spanish media there’s a trend where lots of news are now titled in conditional to try to save face for the fact that the reporter has not done proper fact-checking so they can push the news quicker. And grammatically, it’s the better way, there’s an implied conditional. It also helps avoid clickbait ;)
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- LeifCarrotson 4y agoAllegedly, an anonymous source was reported to have claimed.
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- dfxm12 4y agoThe current headline of the linked article is Accenture cuts jobs, trims forecasts on worries of lower IT spending. I'm not sure if the headline had changed since OP posted it, but if so, there was no need to change it (I doubt Reuters would run with such a poor headline).
- airstrike 4y agoPersonally I would use "to" instead
- re-thc 4y agoThey have a Time Machine. It's in the past!
- abid786 4y agoI’m not sure if OP is Indian but in Indian English this is a pretty standard way of using the conditional tense in that variety of English [1]. It has led to misunderstanding and miscommunication on my part, so I’m not surprised to see such confusion here [1] https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/222166/which-dialects-of-english-consider-would-to-be-a-polite-form-of-will https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/222166/which-dia...
- radicalbyte 4y agoThe OP is Indian. https://twitter.com/koolhead17 https://twitter.com/koolhead17 I thought that this was an Americanism (as I tend to assume that all weird misuse of English is) - thanks for teaching me something new :)
- robofanatic 4y agoWell English is not easy for foreigners. I guess that’s true with any language if you aren’t a native speaker.
- gjvc 4y agowhat do you mean "would" ? The title is clearly "Accenture cuts jobs, trims forecasts on worries of lower IT spending"
- replygirl 4y ago(1) you know exactly what they mean (2) "Accenture ... would cut ... 19,000 jobs" is in the first paragraph (3) you can tell from op's profile that english isn't a first language so what's really going on here
- toomanyrichies 4y ago> "Accenture ... would cut ... 19,000 jobs" is in the first paragraph OK, but the actual title is... in the title itself. I think the bigger question is, why did OP feel the need to make this edit? HN guidelines state "...please use the original title, unless it is misleading or linkbait; don't editorialize." [1] > you know exactly what they mean I didn't, at least not when I first read the headline. As mentioned in other comments, the use of "would" implies a condition, i.e. "Accenture would cut 19k jobs if ____ (some condition were met)." In grammar, it's called the 2nd conditional. [2] That's how "would" is normally used in this context. And if we assume that OP followed the HN guidelines, we'll assume that's what the article is about. As it turns out, that's not what the article actually says. In this case, I had to click into the article to find that out. By itself, that's only a few wasted seconds. Not a huge deal, but it's not exactly a good thing either. More broadly, if we don't call this kind of thing out when it happens, it will tend to happen more often, and that will affect the user experience of this site. Maintaining a minimum standard of grammar in headlines is one of the ways we keep this site usable. If English isn't OP's first language, maybe they should be more careful with English-language edits. I don't think that's asking too much. 1. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html 2. https://www.perfect-english-grammar.com/second-conditional.html https://www.perfect-english-grammar.com/second-conditional.h...
- replygirl 4y agoit can be argued the title of the article on reuters is misleading or inaccurate, because the cuts are not complete op meant to say "will", which would have made for a less ambiguous title. but confusing that with "would" is a common mistake, and it's especially forgivable since "would" was used in the introductory paragraph in a way that appears non-conditional i don't think a simple translation error warrants a bunch of slippery-sloping about The Rules and telling them "if your English isn't perfect, maybe work on that before posting here"
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- spamizbad 4y ago> Accenture now expects annual revenue growth to be between 8% and 10% compared to the previous projection of 8% to 11% increase. Wait, so their projections stayed almost the same? Just 1 point less off the top end?
- mikedg1 4y agoYou'd think that cutting employees would affect annual growth in that case.
- swarnie 4y agoAt a company like this i doubt it. I've got a few buddies working in huge consulting firms, they can spend weeks or months on the bench waiting for an appropriate projects to come up.
- ulysses1244 4y agoLack of employees is almost never the limiting factor at these firms. It’s always the amount of work available
- antr 4y ago1% change in revenue can result in a material deviation in net income and cash flow
- A_D_E_P_T 4y agoSounds like a lot, but apparently they have 738k employees, up from 275k a decade ago, which seems just wild to me. (I don't have a clear idea of what they even do. IT consulting firm?)
- geijoenr 4y agoThey are a body shop. Subcontracting any crap permanent employees won't want to do. That's why they have so many employees, that's literally their "stock".
- andreabergia 4y agoThey do every sort of consulting, including but not only development of custom software. For example, just from the largest Italian bank they make hundreds of millions of euro of revenues yearly.
- nikanj 4y agoThey give your boss a glossy report, which supports your boss doing whatever they planned on doing anyway
- ocimbote 4y agoI will remember this and quote this one, it's brilliantly on point.
- tomrod 4y agoYou're thinking management consulting, like Bain or McKinsey. Accenture is a body shop. They put butts in seats for IT service contracts, typically for the lowest price point for clients.
- orthoxerox 4y agoAccenture does management consulting as well.
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- pcthrowaway 4y agoThis will bring layoffs for just Q1 of this year to >170K: https://layoffs.fyi/ https://layoffs.fyi/ With no end in sight, how many more laid off devs can the industry really support?
- myth_drannon 4y agoMany companies that couldn't hire before now are in a hiring spree.
- gangstead 4y agoThat's what's happening on my email team.
- hahla 4y agoMore than half of the layoffs will affect staff at its non-billable corporate functions, the company said, sending its shares up more than 4% before the bell. The second paragraph in the article.
- zoomablemind 4y agoWhat are these "non-billable corporate functions"?
- tstrimple 4y agoPeople who aren't consultants that bill clients. Based on my experience, there aren't a lot of useless middle managers in consulting as they prefer people with client billable skills. Of the folks I work with, the sales staff aren't billable (but they bring in the sales and are likely safe in scenarios like this) and neither is HR and some of the administration roles. I'm a regional practice manager for a large consulting firm responsible for technical excellence for our consultants as well as setting the strategy for our cloud and applications development practices. I'm still a billable resource who is expected to deliver value directly to individual clients when I'm not doing that or working on new pursuits. The vast majority of people I interact with on a daily basis are all billable. It's not until you hit regional and national VP roles that the demand for billing drops off.
- notlukesky 4y agoMy favorite Accenture story is when they charged Hertz $32 million for a website that never went live. Wonder if they will perform better with a smaller headcount. https://www.henricodolfing.com/2019/10/case-study-hertz-accenture-website.html https://www.henricodolfing.com/2019/10/case-study-hertz-acce...?
- Mizoguchi 4y agoThat's with an American privately owned company. Now you can imagine their deals with corrupt governments in banana republics.
- danjac 4y agoUnless you count the UK as a banana republic (well maybe these days...a turnip monarchy perhaps?) they did manage to fleece the NHS quite successfully: https://www.digitalhealth.net/2021/05/nhs-digital-denies-conflict-over-multimillion-pound-accenture-contracts/ https://www.digitalhealth.net/2021/05/nhs-digital-denies-con...
- cyberpunk 4y agoI worked with some Accenture people on a gov.uk project not a lot of years ago -- they were hand installing redhat 6 machines that we'd have to request via spreadsheet....
- jmclnx 4y agoI wonder how this ended ? But I think it is still in the courts. Not that I am a big fan of Hertz, but I hope the win in order to send a message. Things like this are way too common these days and not only with software, I have seen it myself may times. If I were a CEO (I far from it), I would make sure that the contract states exactly what is needed plus cost recovery if delayed more than 6 months. edit: typos
- jon-wood 4y agoConsultancies like Accenture have a vast army of contract lawyers who'll be on the look out for clauses like that, ensuring that they don't end up out of pocket because a project overran or didn't meet expectations. That initially sounds incredibly shady, however it's not infrequent for projects to fail for reasons outside the contractor's control. Maybe the client can't make up their mind as to what they want, or internal politics mean funding gets cut for the project and it's terminated halfway through. Big contractors absolutely will sign a contract with clauses around deliverables and timelines, but they'll also refer every little deviation from what's listed in that contract to a change control committee to ensure it's accounted for, and doesn't come back to bite them in the ass. Mostly you don't want to run a project like that, because as you work through the implementation you find variations from what was originally documented, or new edge cases that need dealing with. In many cases you're better off taking the risk of overspend or overrun than ending up with some software that perfectly fulfils a set of requirements that don't reflect reality.
- hnrodey 4y agoWhat's not clear based on the article alone is the employee location of these cuts. Accenture is very big on using non-US labor for just about everything they possible can for (my assumption) lower cost of labor. If these cuts are coming to higher-cost-of-labor countries then it would be wise to look closer if they can to shift these jobs to India/similar (which is again is playing into their human capital model). source: former Accenture employee
- chasd00 4y agoMy guy says most cuts will be in the US. They’re decreasing office space by 25%.
- virtuosarmo 4y agoAccording to an article in the Financial Times (gated), more than half the cuts would be coming in corporate functions (i.e. back office) and not client-facing roles (i.e. sales, delivery, dev, etc.). https://www.ft.com/content/346357fd-4fb5-4794-9706-807eaf767d06 https://www.ft.com/content/346357fd-4fb5-4794-9706-807eaf767...
- beckingz 4y agoYou can also find that information on page 23 of their quarterly filing with the SEC [0] 0 - https://otp.tools.investis.com/clients/us/accenture2/SEC/sec-show.aspx?FilingId=16509145&Cik=0001467373&Type=PDF&hasPdf=1 https://otp.tools.investis.com/clients/us/accenture2/SEC/sec...
- distcs 4y agoFor people like me who are not very familiar with some of these corporate terms, can someone explain exactly what "back office" means? Is it IT? I understand sales, delivery, etc. Dev is software development teams? So I presume back office excludes software development teams? Any concrete examples of teams that belong to back office?
- the_only_law 4y agoI think back office is just a generic term for non customer facing positions, usually supporting internal operations in a corporate environment, not a specific department or function. So a software developer could be back office depending on context.
- cpitman 4y agoFinance, Human Resources, Internal IT, Recruiting, Facilities, etc. Any role that the customer is not directly interfacing with or paying for.
- chasd00 4y ago“Back office “ in this case means employees who are not billing clients and therefore do not bring any money to the firm. In consulting you have to be billable at a rate a certain percentage above your cost based on your level in the firm. High level people have to bill a lot more than they cost to maintain their target margin. If you’re not billing then you only cost money. There’s no other revenue source in consulting than billing time to a client.
- jmclnx 4y agoI looked them up, forgetting were I heard them from. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Accenture https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Accenture They went on a buying spree over the past 3 years. I wonder if they are using this financial environment to get rid of people that came with these purchases.
- antman 4y agoThey are outsourcing aggressively and high ranking people have metrics about work that has been offshored. Theu are providing services mostly "by the hour" or per project whose internal metrics are also compared with charged hours. Because of their metrics being directly correlated with headcount they need to hire. Probably they will be hiding their offshoring behind the general lay off environment and is not comparable with the reasons for the tech sectors layoffs. In the grand scheme of things it is not a large number for the size of the company but it would be a good number for a moderate offshore hiring spree. Their employee churn is a lot larger.
- user3939382 4y agoOh no, who will provide US companies with Filipino call centers now?
- eitally 4y agoI wonder if any of this is as a result of any of their big tech clients scaling back their TVC usage. Google, for example, has about 180,000 FTEs and another 180,000 TVCs. One might reasonably assume that, if an enterprise were to go on an efficiency drive, lots of process rationalization & simplification would occur, obviating he need for so many vendor supplied staff. That said, Accenture is like most of the big consulting & outsourcing firms in having a stack ranking review process that encourages low performers to leave.
- hobo_mark 4y agoTVC = Temporary, Vendor or Contractor
- danieldisu 4y agoThanks!
- vanilla_nut 4y agoDoes anyone know why the big companies didn't scale back their TVC (Temporary, Vendor or Contractor) usage before laying off full-time staff that take an order of magnitude more resources to hire and fire? I was under the impression that flexibility was one of the big reasons for TVC use, much easier to scale up or down, akin to cloud computing resources. I suppose the lack of TVC scale-down at companies like Google is yet another indication that layoffs aren't a financial necessity or even a best practice; it's just the hot market signal to show investors that you're serious about "battening down the hatches" for "economic downturn."
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- sjamaan 4y agoProbably because a TVC that doesn't pull its weight will be let go right away. I suspect that the "economic downturn" is just an excuse to trim the fat. Also note the wording in OP: these are "non-billable corporate functions". ie middle management and such.
- pil0u 4y ago> More than half of the 19,000 jobs to be cut will be in its non-billable corporate functions, Accenture said, sending its shares up more than 4% before the bell. I'm not yet accustomed to the fact that some people see the equivalent of a city being laid off as a favorable signal.
- kobalsky 4y agoAs I understand it's not a favorable signal but a correction. The market price, in theory, already reflected the expected demand downturn so measures taken to lower their "non-billable corporate functions" costs usually means that the market will correct the price. That said, I'm not a fan of corporate behemoths using humans as an elastic resource or ballast they can throw away at the first sign of problems. This isn't a mom and pop that can't keep paying an employee during hard times but a public company keeping their year-to-year indicators looking pretty.
- maxlamb 4y agoThe stock price reflects the expected sum of all future profits, not the general opinion of the company based on today’s news
- LeifCarrotson 4y agoIt's a favorable signal if you think that they have too many employees for their current requirements - or if you think that they have enough inertia to produce good results in the next quarter due to a drastic cut in expenses, and you plan to exit before the long-term effects catch up to them. It could also mean that you still think that their ship is sinking, but it's just sinking a little slower now. No one thinks it's an ethically good thing to do, or that the human lives affected by it are irrelevant. The direction of their stock is almost completely divorced from those kinds of questions, and is instead a purely financial judgement. It's good to be somewhat confused by that state of affairs, otherwise you'll mistake wealth or popularity for goodness or rightness. We need to be careful to structure the our society and the means to change our culture such that we don't systemically bias it towards unfavorable outcomes that might be more successful in a more ruthless environment.
- saos 4y agoHow big are these guys :/
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- henrygrew 4y agoWhat exactly does Accenture do? i'm wondering what these 19,000 roles are
- chasd00 4y agoEverything. In any random group of 100 tech suits there will be 3 or 4 Accenture people.
- asah 4y agoChatGPT ? /s
- ftxbro 4y ago"Companies remain focused on executing compressed transformations"
- airstrike 4y agoYou know, using absolute numbers to talk about layoffs is unhelpful, and extrapolating trends from them makes for bad, possibly harmful analysis. I get that big numbers draw eyeballs, but still. The next best alternative is to express it in terms of a % of total employees. Better yet would be to compare the # of employees over time (possibly expressed as a proportion of some business metric such as revenue). Is this just a reversion to the mean? And is such reversion because they over-hired or because their revenue growth has meaningfully slowed? But real useful insight would also require comparing this to other companies, including smaller ones. Just as bad as, or possibly worse than, Accenture cutting 19,000 jobs—some single digit percentage of its employees—would be to have thousands of companies cut, say, 20% of their staff. There's a lot of availability bias in just plotting absolute layoff numbers from Big Tech and other large cap businesses.
- petesergeant 4y ago> about 2.5% of its workforce ... in its non-billable corporate functions ... sending its shares up 6.4% This really isn't news except for the people affected
- latchkey 4y agoWhen companies have layoffs, one thing they do not discuss in the numbers that they publish, is the fact that they cut contractors as well. Now you're seeing the other side of that.
- rustdesk 4y agoI guess they can cut 50% HCs if they can use ChatGPT 4 correctly.
- robinhood 4y ago"People's first company".