An amazing bit of context here is that Accenture were the ones who got hired to replace the incompetent contractors who built the disastrous first version of healthcare.gov. Apparently large-scale web development projects have a hard time getting good talent.
Accenture sued over website redesign so bad it Hertz
21–30 of 65 posts
Re: Accenture sued over website redesign so bad it Hertz
#22This is why you outsource; the executive that decided to use Accenture is most likely safe despite the failure. Nobody got fired for hiring Microsoft or IBM for a project. The person who gets fired is the executive that says "we can do this in house" and comes up at 90-110% but stepped on the wrong board member's toes.
I actually did the exact opposite but I hedged my bets. Accenture was awarded a 40 million dollar by Marriott. At the time I was a fairly powerful executive at Marriott that was in charge of the web middle-ware and infrastructure technologies. They delivered a plan and it was pretty much we are going to build this whole thing on JSP, Struts and WebSphere. I wrote a manifesto to the board about how doing so was settin…
This mirrors my own experience from within accenture about a decade ago. There were serious professionalism issues, not to mention the pm nightmare shoved on devs.
Re: Accenture sued over website redesign so bad it Hertz
#23Well the reality is that this setup is even more expensive than internal
talent! I have hired and manage a team of 5 people for data analytics work. Our IT keeps pushing us to user offshore resources at hourly rates instead (Capgemini, same crap as Accenture) that would end up costing the company 2-3 times more then our internal analysts. On top of that these people are not well trained, lack motivation, do mistakes everywhere and somehow always put the fault of all problems back to you, because you did not test well or not write all requirements etc.. I am saving the compay hundreds of thousands, I could save millions but I just can’t fight this all political mess alone. The interesting point is that my analysts do work in an offshore location, but we pay them well and we spend a lot of time training them on sound technologies, not the crap consulting comes up with. Also we kid ourselves thinking projects end, in real life projects become routine work so hiring people on project basis does not work, you pay them a temp work premium but it’s not temp work.
Re: Accenture sued over website redesign so bad it Hertz
#24An amazing bit of context here is that Accenture were the ones who got hired to replace the incompetent contractors who built the disastrous first version of healthcare.gov. Apparently large-scale web development projects have a hard time getting good talent.
>Apparently large-scale web development projects have a hard time getting good talent.
... for acceptable wages. That's the kicker.
Good talent doesn't sign up for large-scale web projects at $20k/year.
Re: Accenture sued over website redesign so bad it Hertz
#25I work for a fairly large corporation that was looking at Accenture (among other firms) to help augment our team on a complete revamp of a current web product. By the time we were taking RFP's and listening to pitches, we as a company had already chosen the stack and architecture of how we wanted this new product to be. It wasn't anything out of the ordinary: Typescript with React / Redux with various services hosted…
They do. All the code they would have "Written" would have been done by offshoring teams in india or mexico or etc. These offshore locations only know specific technologies. A specific building in India, for example, may only know how to write WCF code that gets data from a SOAP call. Their Mexico building may genuinely only know how to write WPF applications. To be clear, this isn't a knock against Mexican or Indian…
>To be clear, this isn't a knock against Mexican or Indian people. But the people working in these accenture buildings are literally writing code using windows notepad, in un-airconditioned rooms, and fired if they don't deliver on time.
I just stopped reading after this. You are full of yourself.
I had the chance to work with a team in Accenture Mexico, and they offices are nothing but great, just look at the pictures:
https://foursquare.com/v/accenture/4cc081f11c6c6dcb00d8755e
Your entire comment is just a bunch of lies, not sure what you are trying to accomplish.
I'm not defending Accenture over this lawsuit, but it seems that you bring so much hate with that comment.
Re: Accenture sued over website redesign so bad it Hertz
#26Earlier quoted context omitted.
They do. All the code they would have "Written" would have been done by offshoring teams in india or mexico or etc. These offshore locations only know specific technologies. A specific building in India, for example, may only know how to write WCF code that gets data from a SOAP call. Their Mexico building may genuinely only know how to write WPF applications. To be clear, this isn't a knock against Mexican or Indian…
>To be clear, this isn't a knock against Mexican or Indian people. But the people working in these accenture buildings are literally writing code using windows notepad, in un-airconditioned rooms, and fired if they don't deliver on time. I just stopped reading after this. You are full of yourself. I had the chance to work with a team in Accenture Mexico, and they offices are nothing but great, just look at the pictur…
I left Accenture upset by a number of the practices that I saw, even though I largely worked with very good people.
I also was definitely overreacting when I wrote the above, as I am currently dealing with an issue with an overseas contracting team at the moment, and used the above comment to blow off some steam. I apologize for the vitriol.
Monte Ray is the new facility they were building when I left. I'm happy to hear it might actually be a good building.
When I left, it was explained to me that on Monday mornings, many of the Mexican development team were driven via school bus over the border to work in the SouthWest, and that as a result, American hiring was going to be at least temporarily frozen, and that they would be responsible solely for WPF applications.
The line about un-airconditioned buildings and notepad is how the office we were working with in India was described to me by the manager in charge of that team on my project.
I thought, given the similarities of those two stories, that conditions would therefore be similar to the Mexican office.
I apologize for the mistake, and am happy to hear that I am wrong. Apologies for the incorrect comment.
Re: Accenture sued over website redesign so bad it Hertz
#27I will be honest to admit, before I read this article, I didn't even know charging $32 million was possible for a website.
Re: Accenture sued over website redesign so bad it Hertz
#28I used to work for an "orange" company close to Accenture, I left for these exact reasons
Re: Accenture sued over website redesign so bad it Hertz
#29This is why you outsource; the executive that decided to use Accenture is most likely safe despite the failure. Nobody got fired for hiring Microsoft or IBM for a project. The person who gets fired is the executive that says "we can do this in house" and comes up at 90-110% but stepped on the wrong board member's toes.
I actually did the exact opposite but I hedged my bets. Accenture was awarded a 40 million dollar by Marriott. At the time I was a fairly powerful executive at Marriott that was in charge of the web middle-ware and infrastructure technologies. They delivered a plan and it was pretty much we are going to build this whole thing on JSP, Struts and WebSphere. I wrote a manifesto to the board about how doing so was settin…
So what backend did you standardize on?
Re: Accenture sued over website redesign so bad it Hertz
#30I will be honest to admit, before I read this article, I didn't even know charging $32 million was possible for a website.
Brace for impact.
https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2014-09-24/obamacare...
"The federal government’s Obamacare enrollment system has cost about $2.1 billion so far, according to a Bloomberg Government analysis of contracts related to the project."