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Sounds 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 eve
by A_D_E_P_T 4y ago
Sounds 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.
- tomrod 4y agoWhile true, in my understanding they aren't the best-in-class for their management consulting, and the bulk of the labor is in body shop.
- Mizoguchi 4y agoAuditing and compliance, IT services, software development, cyber security, supply change.. They are a jack of all trades, master of none.
- hotpotamus 4y agoMy impression was that they take a lot of government money and technically keep a lot of government employees classified as private ones. My brother-in-law leads a software team that works on state benefits systems I believe.
- ly3xqhl8g9 4y agoThey take the government money alright; laughed out loud reading: "Accenture engaged in an IT overhaul project for the British National Health Service (NHS) in 2003, making headlines when it withdrew from the contract in 2006 over disputes related to delays and cost overruns" [1]. But then I cried (thinking about my tax rate) when reading: "In 2012, it was revealed Accenture was paying only 3.5% in tax in the Republic of Ireland as opposed to the average rate of 24% it would pay if instead based in the UK." As any real company Accenture was headquartered in Bermuda in the 2000s and nowadays it's in Ireland. What can you expect from a company split from the Arthur Andersen. [1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Accenture https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Accenture
- marban 4y agoFiverr for the corporate world with 100x pricing.
- screwturner68 4y agoThey are like moles, they start with one or two and then they multiply until they are everywhere. They don't do much but you can't get rid of them.
- jackdh 4y agoHaving worked there in the past this can be the view from the outside. My anecdotal evidence is that those small starter teams do deliver alot of value, of which the client likes and wants more of. However the client does not have the resources to do this themselves (Likely the reason ACN are there to start). Then from here it's self-fulfilling, more people leads to more projects leads more resources.
- creshal 4y agoAnd usually, the client has money for TVCs but not enough internal resources due to dysfunctional management hierarchies. Those same hierarchies will then inevitably fail to make proper use of the contractors, just as they failed to make use of their employees, leading to seemingly "useless" TVCs "bloating" the org. Symptom rather than cause of the client's failings.
- candiddevmike 4y agoThe consulting playbook for these companies is bring in a rockstar team at or below cost for an initial project. Blow the client's mind with velocity and quality, then scope out of a bunch of follow on work using the highest margin, cheapest offshore resources they can find.
- tootie 4y agoI worked in boutique tech services for a long time and have overlapped with Accenture a few times. You are correct. Some of the smartest and most effective people work in consulting. The kind of people who can swoop in to a random company, size up their operations in a few weeks and spit out an actionable plan that really works. None of those kind of people work at Accenture. They employ the "1000 monkeys at a 1000 typewriters" approach to problem solving. Even before their big push offshore they used to land hundreds of liberal arts grads into a tech enterprise and ask them to just figure stuff out and bill as many hours as possible.
- beckingz 4y agoAt this point, almost half of their revenue (7.5/16B in Q1 2023 from the 10-Q filing) is for their outsourcing / "managed services" business. They expect half of the reduction to be in their non-billable corporate area. It's also fascinating to realize that their REVENUE per employee is ~85K USD.
- Melingo 4y agoNo clue how this works. So everyone has to earn at least below 50k? I mean overhead cost, building rents and c level salaries?!
- Macha 4y agoDon't forget they're a large multinational. They have both employees and customers in lower income economies.
- pappler 4y agoAbout 10 years ago I worked with someone in Australia who was from India. He worked for Accenture in India as a programmer and earned around 180USD per month. So their profit for outsourced work can be a lot.
- qsort 4y ago> It's also fascinating to realize that their REVENUE per employee is ~85K USD. Is it me or this number is ridiculously awful? I work for a small firm that isn't even US-based and we are easily at multiples of that figure.
- turnsout 4y agoIt's not good in absolute terms, but when you look at their headcount… wow
- mjr00 4y agoPart of the value prop of Accenture is that they employee inexpensive foreign labor. They have 300,000 employees in India alone[0]. If those people are working at $20,000 a year, that's 300,000 * 65,000 = $19.5 billion in yearly profit from those employees alone. And India is a relatively expensive country these days; their margins in Vietnam and Thailand are probably even greater. [0] https://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/business/india-business/accentures-india-employee-strength-rises-to-3-lakh/articleshow/91058669.cms https://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/business/india-business/...
- lucideer 4y ago> I don't have a clear idea of what they even do. IT consulting firm? They do do some IT consulting, among other things, but the vast majority of their workforce is providing cheap sales & support staff to FAANG companies - these companies are famous for having well-remunerated staff, with generous benefits, hired through protracted interview processes. In reality most people actually working on their products are hired cheaply through vendors like Accenture and Cognizant.
- toyg 4y agoYou're using FAANG too liberally. Accenture is not focused on selling to tech companies, they have existed since forever (they were a branch of Andersen Consulting). Their market is "big companies", any big companies.
- jxf 4y agoAnd big federal agencies and governments.
- deleted 4y ago[deleted]
- lucideer 4y ago> You're using FAANG too liberally [...] Their market is "big companies", any big companies. That's fair (though I can't edit now) - it's certainly not exclusively FAANG, though it is a significant percentage. Public contracts may be a similar or larger percentage.
- PMan74 4y agoContent moderation is another one - farm it off to an external entity like Accenture to manage and you are at arms length from putting some poor content moderator in front of some pretty disturbing content. https://www.nytimes.com/2021/08/31/technology/facebook-accenture-content-moderation.html https://www.nytimes.com/2021/08/31/technology/facebook-accen...
- _the_inflator 4y ago
- Tade0 4y agoI did an internship there years ago and was profoundly useless.
- CalRobert 4y agoMy wife worked for them in Dublin and a huge amount of them were content moderators looking at horrifying things people had posted on Facebook. It sounded like a terrible job that destroys people's minds. She wasn't in that department but _detests_ Accenture regardless.
- iamflimflam1 4y agoYes, I worked for a slightly dubious precursor to things like onlyfans (much cleaner, their tagline was "keep it flirty, not dirty"). The content moderation team was mostly women and the things they dealt with were generally pretty horific.
- butler14 4y agoThey'll sell you anything. Look at the service offerings in the main navigation on their website, it's hilarious. I've just had the 'pleasure' of being party to some of their 'SEO' advice (to a large global pharma company, who was paying them $$$ p/h).
- whitehexagon 4y ago> (I don't have a clear idea of what they even do. IT consulting firm?) you dont even want to know, just be sure that if they get invited in to join a project, leave! At least from my experience on their IT side, was it Andersen before a rebrand? Drop in 3 developers, then sell a 'manager' to oversee them, then recommend a few more devs, and add another layer of management, and so on. I saw 3 projects suffer this type of infection, and they all suffered for it.
- DebtDeflation 4y ago> IT consulting firm? That's what they started out as (actually, as a spinoff of Arthur Andersen, so both management consulting and IT consulting). Nowadays, most of their business is outsourcing. Companies will outsource the maintenance/support of entire applications to them (like take over a company's billing system and be responsible for keeping it running and making ongoing enhancements) or an entire business process (like Accounts Payable). Typically they "rebadge" the client's employees as Accenture employees, charge the client X% less than what the client is paying to do it themselves, and then reduce headcount, offshore some work, automate some functions, etc. in order to run a profit. Source: I work for a large consulting firm that competes with them.