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I had a job interview with Accenture that had 2 parts a dinner and a technical chat. 1. At the dinner their representative spoke about how life at Accenture wa
by frozenport 13y ago
I had a job interview with Accenture that had 2 parts a dinner and a technical chat.
1. At the dinner their representative spoke about how life at Accenture was a breeze and how as a undergraduate he spent most of this time drinking. He drank on the weekdays but his favorite time to drink was on Sundays. He said he used to do some SQL but now he had moved onto the business side of things. One of the candidates told us how his hobby of skydiving let him see the big picture and another told us that his desi background would enabled to come up culture specific features for software services. I probed this question further, and he said that in India showing your muscles was considered hubris, while in America it made you look strong. On his facebook page he wouldn't show his bare chest... Nobody at the table `looked` like they could do any programming work.
2. During the technical interview I was asked what `clubs` I was in. I told them I wasn't in many clubs and instead spent my time doing research work (which by that time had yield publications) and administrating websites. I told them my hobby was programming. I wanted to tell them how I dealt with EC2 sight outages, worked with clients and their clients to write WordPress plugins. I wanted to talk about my experience engineering our production and outsourcing workflow. I wanted to summarize the techniques I learned overseeing our production staff. They didn't comprehend and asked he what `clubs` I was in.
I was scheduled to have 3 interviews, I walked out after the first. Don't work for Accenture, they are a joke because their employees are a joke, which is much in agreement with this article.
They also have 275,000 employees.
- tedsanders 13y agoI often wonder if this attitude makes the problem worse. If good programmers don't work for Accenture because Accenture is full of bad programmers, then how can Accenture ever become better? How can it evolve to provide better contracting services? If you were in charge of Accenture hiring strategy, what would you change?
- danmaz74 13y agoIMHO they would need to acknowledge there is a problem and launch a public program to fix it. "Come fix the biggest consulting company in the world" could attract top talent. But they just can't do it, even if they wanted - how would customers react?
- usea 13y ago> If you were in charge of Accenture hiring strategy, what would you change? Is my goal to improve the ability of the developers? What does that gain me? If the ability of my talent is only loosely coupled with landing contracts, then I'd try to maximize the gulf between the salary I pay and the value they provide. If fresh grads can produce good enough work to satisfy contracts, and they cost less, they're my target. Many firms work this way, and it seems to be a fairly successful strategy if you can land the contracts. Having a few senior, competent people in the mix probably helps hedge against any serious problems. Also, I'd make sure to get everybody as many useless certifications from big companies as possible, as they improve our ability to land contracts. I'm just playing devil's advocate though. My real answer is I'd change my job.
- frozenport 13y agoEasy, rebrand and say they are gathering people for a new team. Maybe call it Accenture+. Maybe don't even use the Accenture name. Start a lean technical consulting service company that is 100% owned by Accenture. With 275,000 employee it is clear they are looking for volume and not talent.
- ericd 13y agoGood point, working for Walmart Labs is actually a much more appealing idea than working for Walmart.
- frozenport 13y agoYes, and if they weren't retarded they would call themselves Walton Research, or perhaps be publicly traded with Walmart owning 80% of the stock and being the sole client?
- ericd 13y agoHeh it could be better, but the important part is that it's separate and mostly independent, so hopefully less mired in bureaucracy.
- AjithAntony 13y agoThey kinda did that: http://www.avanade.com/en-us/Pages/default.aspx http://www.avanade.com/en-us/Pages/default.aspx
- jessaustin 13y agoIf you were in charge of Accenture hiring strategy... ...then I would be well compensated for not changing a thing. They've had this model since they were "Andersen Consulting" (the rest of us on project teams with them called them Androids, before "android" was cool [this was also before "Andersen" became exceedingly uncool]), and they bank by the truckload. Apparently there is a type of customer that wants legions of safety-school graduates with lots of highlighter in the first three chapters of their "For Dummies" books.