5 ms·

Accenture dubs 800k staff 'reinventors' amid shift to AI

58 points by n1b0m 11mo ago

ablation 11mo ago
This is very, very funny. Pathetic too, of course. But mostly very funny. Has it ever delivered much more than boiler-plate consultancy packaged in buzzwords at the best of times? Now with added slop!
- abdulhaq 11mo ago
  Actually, back in the day Andersens (and EDS) were some of the few companies that could deliver really big systems (for all their faults) e.g. https://accountancyage.com/2000/03/16/andersen-consulting-to-pay-no-more-compensation-for-overdue-computer-system/ https://accountancyage.com/2000/03/16/andersen-consulting-to... . Each year a number of analysts had nervous breakdowns, I worked with one of them.
  - chasd00 11mo ago
    I worked on some very large very emergency contact tracing, disease surveillance, and vaccine management implementations during covid. Someone on one of my teams ended up in an inpatient facility after a breakdown. Having senior leadership break down in tears on calls was unusual but not unheard of during that time either. Analysts and others at that level went from ok to very not ok in about 90 days. No one cares about consultants, they get ground to dust and then replaced with another team. I was paid well but it was a tough time.
    - alfiedotwtf 11mo ago
      I found this too. They’re under a lot of pressure, especially because if they don’t deliver, their visa will be yanked and replaced with the next cog
- elzbardico 11mo ago
  Accenture is more like a body shop or software factory than a traditional consultancy. Their business model is based on the fact that most non-tech companies have a deeply seated prejudice against paying software and system engineers high salaries and that most of their software engineering senior leadership is hopelessly out of date in technology, but are well-connected with the rest of the leadership team, and can't be replaced directly by more competent, younger people. So they spend vastly more money to outsource things to Accenture than they would do paying good salaries to engineers. But then, the idiots at Wall Street are allergic to any dollar spent on salaries, while always thinking dollar wasted on companies like accenture is "investment" and thus "a good thing".
  - consp 11mo ago
    Why keep people with knowledge of the systems in your company when you can not have it from the start! (/s obviously)
    - elzbardico 11mo ago
      I came to the conclusion the most executives in big non-tech enterprises fear an overly powerful IT and actively take decisions that have the goal of making IT less powerful. It is not very different from ancient Roman Emperors making sure generals that were too successful or popular ended up suffering some funny fatal accident.
- chasd00 11mo ago
  Accenture is a big place, it has a “nice part of town” where there’s genuinely good people who do good things. There’s also the boring part of town where they just “turn the crank and go home”. There’s also “the wrong side of the tracks” that’s just career nightmare fuel. /not admitting I work there but… you know
tcmb 11mo ago
For me this term makes them sound inefficient or even redundant, as in somebody reinventing the wheel.
- didgeoridoo 11mo ago
  Perhaps that’s the point.
  - another-dave 11mo ago
    From a _consultancy_ it feels a bit on the nose. Do you have a system that's mostly working at the moment? We'll migrate that at huge cost to something else (for little upside, but it'll get sold in really well to senior management)
    - fishmicrowaver 11mo ago
      This marketing effort is aimed at shareholders, not customers or employees. The stock has been tanking hard and she's just replicating the strategy of staying in AI related news hoping for a bump. Hopefully it works, for the employees anyway, so they can dump their own shares.
- pwillia7 11mo ago
  should have gone with innovationeers
  - Esophagus4 11mo ago
    I like it - it’s like Disney’s Imagineer role, but much, much more stupid and without any of the fun stuff! (Disney Imagineering seems like one of the coolest jobs on the planet: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Walt_Disney_Imagineering https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Walt_Disney_Imagineering)
cyanydeez 11mo ago
'Guys, know how we figured out the basics of what we do, and we teach the interns and juniors it, and everyone just gravitates towards a workable model? Yes? Well, forget all that, lets learn how to do that much, but ignore everyone else in the hopes we never have to hire juniors or interns again!'
ivape 11mo ago
First, your role gets renamed … Then you get laid off. It’s kind of sad to see everyone being walked out of the factory, the final shutters on the modest profession of programming. I guess this is kind of exactly what it would look like, that bittersweet moment of ‘it’s actually really happening, and it’s actually really sad’. Part of me wishes we could freeze time, that if we could just keep it like this, this many jobs, this many people, keep it a nice small village … But this tidal wave before us doesn’t care. So long folks.
- throwaway290 11mo ago
  Most of people here think "I will be fine, only the other guy gets fired, programmers always will be needed". And we are tempted by new shiny stuff or we think using llms will help us keep the job but really by agreeing to what is happening and not being skeptic and standing against we dig our career graves. Kind of tragedy.
  - margorczynski 11mo ago
    A lot of people here have overgrown egos and really believe they are irreplaceable. And reality can come at you really fast.
    - rightbyte 11mo ago
      Even actually being irreplaceable doesn't help if management doesn't agree. And increasing costs 10 fold due to letting go of someone that were doing two teams worth of work on some internal system he had 20y of experience with wont show up in some table in some power point.
  - lovehashbrowns 11mo ago
    Should’ve gone the art-industry route instead of this. Posting any kind of ai-generated art in an art community gets hostile pretty quickly.
  - JamesSwift 11mo ago
    If you view yourself as a "backend developer" or, worse, "a react developer" then sure. If you view yourself as a "person who solves business problems with technology" then the only thing AI does is enable you to do more.
camillomiller 11mo ago
I love what they did with the Metaverse too. Such trailblazing work.
- sethops1 11mo ago
  Haha, I hadn't heard about this before https://www.accenture.com/us-en/services/metaverse https://www.accenture.com/us-en/services/metaverse > executives expect 4.2% of their revenues coming from metaverse in the next 3 years—a value of $1 trillion I wonder if that KPI is still on target.
  - coldpie 11mo ago
    Hahahahah > 81% of executives say metaverse related technologies are inspiring their organization’s vision or long-term strategy > 90% of executives anticipate an increase in the level of resources their organizations will dedicate to metaverse related technologies in the next 3-5 years > $1T executives expect 4.2% of their revenues coming from metaverse in the next 3 years—a value of $1 trillion If ever there was an argument that executives would be more productive members of society if they were flipping burgers, it's this website.
    - alfiedotwtf 11mo ago
      As I’ve experienced before with Accenture, this is the problem you get when you only hire Yes Men
    - binary132 11mo ago
      Erm, have you seen the news lately? Big line go up bigger than ever before. Very productive. Extra big number line up
      - coldpie 11mo ago
        You're right. Bonuses for everybody (who already has a net worth of $10M or more)!
AndrewDucker 11mo ago
To be fair, with the level of competence of most Accenture staff, they're basically on par with most AI anyway.
- ryandvm 11mo ago
  Honestly, of all the people that should be sweating LLMs taking their jobs, it should be enterprise consulting folks - especially the ones at places like McKinsey. A large portion of those jobs involve writing bullshit rehashed documentation that nobody reads, which is a specialty of LLMs.
  - skizm 11mo ago
    McKinsey and other consulting companies aren't really paid to consult so much as they are paid scapegoats. Management just needs someone to blame if something goes wrong. LLMs won't really ever replace them.
    - FiatLuxDave 11mo ago
      "The computer said so" has been a scapegoat since the 1960s.
    - phantasmish 11mo ago
      They're also useful for industrial espionage. It gets laundered as "industry best practices" and it's part of what you (may) pay them for.
    - mschild 11mo ago
      Not just to blame. They also sell credibility to a lot of managers and bosses. I've experienced it often enough that upper management doesn't listen to their own employees. Ultimately, a consultant comes in, talks to employees, suggests the exact same thing to the same people, and they love it. Having that branding on the ppt slides sells ideas. If you're a project manager or department lead and need to push through an idea but your boss won't let you? Try hiring a consultant who will sell it to your boss.
  - 11mo ago
citizenkeen 11mo ago
I can always trust a large consultancy to reinvent the wheel.
- chasd00 11mo ago
  “Consulting: if you’re not a part of the solution there’s money to be made prolonging the problem” - despair.com :)
BruiseLee 11mo ago
My employer wants to rename all software developer positions to "prompt engineers". This is to emphasize our shift to be "AI-first".
- daveguy 11mo ago
  Yikes. Good luck. Hope you've already started the job search.
- phantasmish 11mo ago
  It's so hard to tell whether these people are genuinely stupid, or just pretending to be because that's what they think will be rewarded (and the latter might be correct and a non-stupid thing to do!)
- userulluipeste 11mo ago
  I wonder if anyone will include the "prompt engineer" in their CV/Resume. Otherwise, if one of the future employers decides to crosscheck a title that's anything different than what your current employer wants to call you, then it may lead to a credibility loss.
- simonw 11mo ago
  Is this a joke? It's so hard to tell these days.
- binary132 11mo ago
  Run screaming, do not look back.
- stronglikedan 11mo ago
  As long as the compensation goes up, they can call me whatever they want!
Havoc 11mo ago
That does sound like a consulting plan …
- pan69 11mo ago
  They must have hired McKinsey to advice them.
petesergeant 11mo ago
> Curious job titles are also popular in the media and entertainment industries, including at Walt Disney, where technical experts who design and build its theme parks are referred to as “imagineers”. Sorta shit you can pull off if you're Disney, absolutely not something you can pull off if you're fucking Accenture. People as old as me may remember the KPMG song[0] 0: https://www.theguardian.com/business/2001/dec/09/theobserver.observerbusiness14 https://www.theguardian.com/business/2001/dec/09/theobserver...
binary132 11mo ago
That’s so vapid only an AI psychosis binge session could have produced it
mrcsharp 11mo ago
Are they reinventing how strip their clients of more money to produce more broken mess? [1] This is all just so silly now. [1] https://www.thesaturdaypaper.com.au/news/2025/11/29/inside-the-bureau-meteorologys-96m-website-fiasco https://www.thesaturdaypaper.com.au/news/2025/11/29/inside-t...
deleted 11mo ago
[deleted]
brazukadev 11mo ago
Weak. Vibecoder would be much cooler

58 points by n1b0m 11mo ago

This is very, very funny. Pathetic too, of course. But mostly very funny. Has it ever delivered much more than boiler-plate consultancy packaged in buzzwords at the best of times? Now with added slop!

abdulhaq 11mo ago
Actually, back in the day Andersens (and EDS) were some of the few companies that could deliver really big systems (for all their faults) e.g. https://accountancyage.com/2000/03/16/andersen-consulting-to-pay-no-more-compensation-for-overdue-computer-system/ https://accountancyage.com/2000/03/16/andersen-consulting-to... . Each year a number of analysts had nervous breakdowns, I worked with one of them.
- chasd00 11mo ago
  I worked on some very large very emergency contact tracing, disease surveillance, and vaccine management implementations during covid. Someone on one of my teams ended up in an inpatient facility after a breakdown. Having senior leadership break down in tears on calls was unusual but not unheard of during that time either. Analysts and others at that level went from ok to very not ok in about 90 days. No one cares about consultants, they get ground to dust and then replaced with another team. I was paid well but it was a tough time.
  - alfiedotwtf 11mo ago
    I found this too. They’re under a lot of pressure, especially because if they don’t deliver, their visa will be yanked and replaced with the next cog
elzbardico 11mo ago
Accenture is more like a body shop or software factory than a traditional consultancy. Their business model is based on the fact that most non-tech companies have a deeply seated prejudice against paying software and system engineers high salaries and that most of their software engineering senior leadership is hopelessly out of date in technology, but are well-connected with the rest of the leadership team, and can't be replaced directly by more competent, younger people. So they spend vastly more money to outsource things to Accenture than they would do paying good salaries to engineers. But then, the idiots at Wall Street are allergic to any dollar spent on salaries, while always thinking dollar wasted on companies like accenture is "investment" and thus "a good thing".
- consp 11mo ago
  Why keep people with knowledge of the systems in your company when you can not have it from the start! (/s obviously)
  - elzbardico 11mo ago
    I came to the conclusion the most executives in big non-tech enterprises fear an overly powerful IT and actively take decisions that have the goal of making IT less powerful. It is not very different from ancient Roman Emperors making sure generals that were too successful or popular ended up suffering some funny fatal accident.
chasd00 11mo ago
Accenture is a big place, it has a “nice part of town” where there’s genuinely good people who do good things. There’s also the boring part of town where they just “turn the crank and go home”. There’s also “the wrong side of the tracks” that’s just career nightmare fuel. /not admitting I work there but… you know

tcmb 11mo ago

For me this term makes them sound inefficient or even redundant, as in somebody reinventing the wheel.

didgeoridoo 11mo ago
Perhaps that’s the point.
- another-dave 11mo ago
  From a _consultancy_ it feels a bit on the nose. Do you have a system that's mostly working at the moment? We'll migrate that at huge cost to something else (for little upside, but it'll get sold in really well to senior management)
  - fishmicrowaver 11mo ago
    This marketing effort is aimed at shareholders, not customers or employees. The stock has been tanking hard and she's just replicating the strategy of staying in AI related news hoping for a bump. Hopefully it works, for the employees anyway, so they can dump their own shares.
pwillia7 11mo ago
should have gone with innovationeers
- Esophagus4 11mo ago
  I like it - it’s like Disney’s Imagineer role, but much, much more stupid and without any of the fun stuff! (Disney Imagineering seems like one of the coolest jobs on the planet: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Walt_Disney_Imagineering https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Walt_Disney_Imagineering)

cyanydeez 11mo ago

'Guys, know how we figured out the basics of what we do, and we teach the interns and juniors it, and everyone just gravitates towards a workable model? Yes? Well, forget all that, lets learn how to do that much, but ignore everyone else in the hopes we never have to hire juniors or interns again!'

ivape 11mo ago

First, your role gets renamed … Then you get laid off. It’s kind of sad to see everyone being walked out of the factory, the final shutters on the modest profession of programming. I guess this is kind of exactly what it would look like, that bittersweet moment of ‘it’s actually really happening, and it’s actually really sad’. Part of me wishes we could freeze time, that if we could just keep it like this, this many jobs, this many people, keep it a nice small village … But this tidal wave before us doesn’t care. So long folks.

throwaway290 11mo ago
Most of people here think "I will be fine, only the other guy gets fired, programmers always will be needed". And we are tempted by new shiny stuff or we think using llms will help us keep the job but really by agreeing to what is happening and not being skeptic and standing against we dig our career graves. Kind of tragedy.
- margorczynski 11mo ago
  A lot of people here have overgrown egos and really believe they are irreplaceable. And reality can come at you really fast.
  - rightbyte 11mo ago
    Even actually being irreplaceable doesn't help if management doesn't agree. And increasing costs 10 fold due to letting go of someone that were doing two teams worth of work on some internal system he had 20y of experience with wont show up in some table in some power point.
- lovehashbrowns 11mo ago
  Should’ve gone the art-industry route instead of this. Posting any kind of ai-generated art in an art community gets hostile pretty quickly.
- JamesSwift 11mo ago
  If you view yourself as a "backend developer" or, worse, "a react developer" then sure. If you view yourself as a "person who solves business problems with technology" then the only thing AI does is enable you to do more.

camillomiller 11mo ago

I love what they did with the Metaverse too. Such trailblazing work.

sethops1 11mo ago
Haha, I hadn't heard about this before https://www.accenture.com/us-en/services/metaverse https://www.accenture.com/us-en/services/metaverse > executives expect 4.2% of their revenues coming from metaverse in the next 3 years—a value of $1 trillion I wonder if that KPI is still on target.
- coldpie 11mo ago
  Hahahahah > 81% of executives say metaverse related technologies are inspiring their organization’s vision or long-term strategy > 90% of executives anticipate an increase in the level of resources their organizations will dedicate to metaverse related technologies in the next 3-5 years > $1T executives expect 4.2% of their revenues coming from metaverse in the next 3 years—a value of $1 trillion If ever there was an argument that executives would be more productive members of society if they were flipping burgers, it's this website.
  - alfiedotwtf 11mo ago
    As I’ve experienced before with Accenture, this is the problem you get when you only hire Yes Men
  - binary132 11mo ago
    Erm, have you seen the news lately? Big line go up bigger than ever before. Very productive. Extra big number line up
    - coldpie 11mo ago
      You're right. Bonuses for everybody (who already has a net worth of $10M or more)!

AndrewDucker 11mo ago

To be fair, with the level of competence of most Accenture staff, they're basically on par with most AI anyway.

ryandvm 11mo ago
Honestly, of all the people that should be sweating LLMs taking their jobs, it should be enterprise consulting folks - especially the ones at places like McKinsey. A large portion of those jobs involve writing bullshit rehashed documentation that nobody reads, which is a specialty of LLMs.
- skizm 11mo ago
  McKinsey and other consulting companies aren't really paid to consult so much as they are paid scapegoats. Management just needs someone to blame if something goes wrong. LLMs won't really ever replace them.
  - FiatLuxDave 11mo ago
    "The computer said so" has been a scapegoat since the 1960s.
  - phantasmish 11mo ago
    They're also useful for industrial espionage. It gets laundered as "industry best practices" and it's part of what you (may) pay them for.
  - mschild 11mo ago
    Not just to blame. They also sell credibility to a lot of managers and bosses. I've experienced it often enough that upper management doesn't listen to their own employees. Ultimately, a consultant comes in, talks to employees, suggests the exact same thing to the same people, and they love it. Having that branding on the ppt slides sells ideas. If you're a project manager or department lead and need to push through an idea but your boss won't let you? Try hiring a consultant who will sell it to your boss.
- 11mo ago

citizenkeen 11mo ago

I can always trust a large consultancy to reinvent the wheel.

chasd00 11mo ago
“Consulting: if you’re not a part of the solution there’s money to be made prolonging the problem” - despair.com :)

BruiseLee 11mo ago

My employer wants to rename all software developer positions to "prompt engineers". This is to emphasize our shift to be "AI-first".

daveguy 11mo ago
Yikes. Good luck. Hope you've already started the job search.
phantasmish 11mo ago
It's so hard to tell whether these people are genuinely stupid, or just pretending to be because that's what they think will be rewarded (and the latter might be correct and a non-stupid thing to do!)
userulluipeste 11mo ago
I wonder if anyone will include the "prompt engineer" in their CV/Resume. Otherwise, if one of the future employers decides to crosscheck a title that's anything different than what your current employer wants to call you, then it may lead to a credibility loss.
simonw 11mo ago
Is this a joke? It's so hard to tell these days.
binary132 11mo ago
Run screaming, do not look back.
stronglikedan 11mo ago
As long as the compensation goes up, they can call me whatever they want!

Havoc 11mo ago

That does sound like a consulting plan …

pan69 11mo ago
They must have hired McKinsey to advice them.

petesergeant 11mo ago

> Curious job titles are also popular in the media and entertainment industries, including at Walt Disney, where technical experts who design and build its theme parks are referred to as “imagineers”. Sorta shit you can pull off if you're Disney, absolutely not something you can pull off if you're fucking Accenture. People as old as me may remember the KPMG song[0] 0: https://www.theguardian.com/business/2001/dec/09/theobserver.observerbusiness14 https://www.theguardian.com/business/2001/dec/09/theobserver...

binary132 11mo ago

That’s so vapid only an AI psychosis binge session could have produced it

mrcsharp 11mo ago

Are they reinventing how strip their clients of more money to produce more broken mess? [1] This is all just so silly now. [1] https://www.thesaturdaypaper.com.au/news/2025/11/29/inside-the-bureau-meteorologys-96m-website-fiasco https://www.thesaturdaypaper.com.au/news/2025/11/29/inside-t...

deleted 11mo ago

[deleted]

brazukadev 11mo ago

Weak. Vibecoder would be much cooler