51–60 of 65 posts
I will be honest to admit, before I read this article, I didn't even know charging $32 million was possible for a website.
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> CxO are rarely held accountable for their missteps by the board. Why is that?
Because the company that decides to punish their CxO will have a hard time finding one. People job hunting at that level want a guaranteed golden parachute, whether things go well or not. And the board agrees to pick one of these guys up because that person will implement all the shitty decisions while leaving the board with clean hands. Everybody (who's high enough) wins because they all get their paychecks and bonu…
We should name and shame those who do that. It's a short term success for long term damage. (It's going to take a long time for Hertz to recover from this, and I can't imagine their lawsuit is going to be too successful [they still need a new site])
For me generally, it's execs that come from Cisco or GE tend to do this kind of thing.
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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…
2. It's an open office environment with very little desk space. Most of the in-office pictures are stuff on desks.
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Why should they worry about it? CxO are rarely held accountable for their missteps by the board. Maybe this time it didn't go out unnoticed because someone actually tried to use their website and got pissed off it didn't work
He was eventually pushed out, last summer. But it's not like he had to give his $7 million back.
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>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 h…
I worked in Bangalore in 2005, (the city with the best weather among cities with tech offshoring offices). Even Bangalore had airconditioned offices.
Second-hand bullshit is still bullshit.
This is why you need to develop in-house talent for execution of strategic initiatives. The consultants are very useful for helping formulate strategy and they are worth the money. But implementation has to be done by the organization itself as the knowledge and network required to implement an initiative is deeply organic. Once the management had settled on a strategic direction, they should have hired key executive…
Exactly. All they wanted was a mobile-first website. Did that really require a $32 million investment? An in-house team could've handled that for less, with more trust involved. Focus on hiring good people!
* multi-language and accessible
* desktop, tablet, mobile -- doing this well requires pretty good design chops and a lot of testing
* handles money and credit cards, so requires PCI compliance -- there's little chance they're going to move to something like Stripe at their scale
* probably connects to a godawful homegrown inventory system
* very high uptime requirements
* integration with their analytics chain, to provide highly complex ad reporting and conversion optimization flows
* an administration UI that functions both at the global level and at the store level with complex permissions and reporting given the various management chains involved
Considering even a mid-tier dev costs order $200k fully loaded, a small front-end scrum team of 5 front end eng, a designer, and a PM runs you $1.4/year; a backend team of 10 also with a PM runs $2.5m. That's $8m over 2 years for a pretty small team and not super-expensive talent. I'd initially spec the Hertz site as over $20m to build. And that cost could easily rise.
People are talking about building in-house talent. I was part of the in-house talent at Hertz. We were executing the strategic initiatives (at some level we came up with them), and we were doing a damn fine job at it. In early 2016, they fired us all. We were made to train up our replacements (at IBM in India) in order to receive severance packages. Later we found out that Accenture had picked up the initiative. And…
This 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…
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Exactly. All they wanted was a mobile-first website. Did that really require a $32 million investment? An in-house team could've handled that for less, with more trust involved. Focus on hiring good people!
$32m isn't crazy for a redesign of a large ecommerce site. Consider the needs right out of the box: * multi-language and accessible * desktop, tablet, mobile -- doing this well requires pretty good design chops and a lot of testing * handles money and credit cards, so requires PCI compliance -- there's little chance they're going to move to something like Stripe at their scale * probably connects to a godawful homegr…
I've told people who scoff at $32 million "for a website" that $32 million might actually be low, depending on requirements.