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My life in Accenture before startups

swombat.com

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Re: My life in Accenture before startups

#21

Post by mixmax »

kitsune_ wrote: post #5

My experience (off and on-work) with Accenture was horrible. A small anecdote (out of many): I visited a good friend of mine, a true math and programming genius, who was in the middle of his PhD at the ETHZ. An acquaintance of my friend started to tell bullshit stories about his "heroic" job at Accenture. An untalented money whore if I ever saw one. If you know nothing and have the moral integrity of a human traffick…

I'm sorry but this isn't an anecdote it's a rant. The only hard quantifiable information in your post is that you've worked at Accenture and that you visited a friend who was in the middle of his PHD. The rest is just emotions and yelling at people you don't like.

The fact that this is the top comment [1] on this story is quite frightening to me. It adds nothing to the conversation, and is an open invitation to an unsubstantiated but emotional argument about whether employees at large companies are all assholes that only care about money. Surely enough there's now a whole thread that doesn't add much to the conversation, and from which I've learned nothing.

This is a prime example of the decline of HN.

[1] Since we can't see points it's of course impossible for me to be certain whether this post has many upvotes, or whether it's at the top based on one of the other ranking parameters. (please let us have our points back!)

Re: My life in Accenture before startups

#22

Post by yardie »

kitsune_ wrote: post #18
swombat wrote: post #12

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Perhaps the culture is different in other countries. This was in Accenture UK. Edit: I hate to suggest it, but perhaps there's also a bit of a perceptive bias going on, in both directions. I look for the good in people, and I found plenty of awesome people in Accenture. If you expect Accenture people to be arrogant idiots, probably every Accenture person you meet will look like just that.

When, 9 out of 10 experiences with a company turn out to be negative, it could be argued that you build up a negative bias. I'm not saying that there are no decent people at ACN, there definitely are. Either way, Accenture has an awful reputation within the technology sector imo.

They are still in business and still profitable so they must be doing something right.

On the other hand it took GM decades to burn through their reputation until they had none to salvage. Now they apologize profusely for being a shitty car manufacturer. I still won't buy one btw.

Re: My life in Accenture before startups

#23

Post by swombat »

arethuza wrote: post #20
swombat wrote: post #15

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Any topic that involves advanced maths or other hard science will be hard to pick up quickly (despite doing a Physics degree), but other than those, most business-related activities tend to be fairly straightforward to pick up, so long as you have the right "learning materials" (be it work samples, manuals, people to coach you, whatever makes sense for the activity). Sure, there's a world of difference between "being…

Out of interest, what business areas did you do projects in?

Financial services. In order of appearance in the movie:

- Investment banking (primary/secondary market issue)

- Risk Reporting

- HR / Performance Management

- Prime Brokerage / Hedge Funds

- Middle Office Reconciliations

Re: My life in Accenture before startups

#24

Post by swombat »

rs3123 wrote: post #19

Interesting post. What was that bit about the three heads?

Accenture work tends to be client-facing, so part of the interview was, presumably, to check that I can present myself professionally and make a good impression on the client. In other words, check that I don't have three heads, or some other major personal presentation issue...

Re: My life in Accenture before startups

#25

Post by mbesto »

swombat wrote: post #8
kitsune_ wrote: post #5

My experience (off and on-work) with Accenture was horrible. A small anecdote (out of many): I visited a good friend of mine, a true math and programming genius, who was in the middle of his PhD at the ETHZ. An acquaintance of my friend started to tell bullshit stories about his "heroic" job at Accenture. An untalented money whore if I ever saw one. If you know nothing and have the moral integrity of a human traffick…

Any company with 100k+ people is going to have its share of idiots. I worked there for 4 years and, in my experience, this type of person was definitely a very small minority. I'd blame the person rather than the company for this kind of terribly flawed character.

Agreed that any company is going to have it's share of idiots, but isn't it the principle job of a company like Accenture to hire competent people? Their business model is to lease out intellectual talent so their principle job is to create talent.

I, like most people commenting here, have worked with a lot of bad Accenture people and am shocked when I do actually meet a good one. Yes, they do exist, but most good people don't stay long (much like yourself) because they realize opportunities outside of Accenture are much more lucrative.

Also, their model is fairly obvious now (like other big 4) - huge margins on Jr Consultants that are lead by competent seniors. When the senior people are incompetent and the juniors are not fast learners then the whole model is broken and thus the assumption that "everyone is idiots".

Re: My life in Accenture before startups

#27

Post by edw519 »

My typical day working for a Big 5 firm:

   7:00 - drive to client in Redlands
   8:00 - arrive in Redlands
   8:42 - client arrives for 8:00 meeting
   8:51 - client leaves for emergency
   8:52 - review project with programmer - still 18 months behind
   9:15 - daily email to 6 bosses about dire status
   9:38 - take call from boss #4 - debate "strategic direction"
  10:20 - coffee, snack, & bitch session with lead programmer
  10:45 - drive to client in Century City
  12:20 - arrive in Century City, everyone at lunch already
  12:30 - have hot dog at sidewalk cafe, look for Christina Applegate
   1:15 - meet with client for daily status
   1:22 - client leaves for emergency
   1:28 - review project with programmer - still 18 months behind
   1:40 - daily email to 5 other bosses about dire status
   2:15 - take call from other boss #3 - debate "strategic direction"
   2:28 - referee dispute between contract & employee programmers
   3:20 - coffee, snack, & bitch session with lead programmer
   4:20 - drive home
   5:50 - arrive home
   8:10 - take calls from 4 other bosses debating strategy
   9:20 - end day knowing tomorrow will be exactly the same
   Total work done: 0
My typical day working for an enterprise:

   7:30 - drive to work
   7:50 - arrive at work, turn on Windows workstation
   7:51 - get coffee, greet co-workers
   8:10 - workstation finally up, check overnight logs
   8:15 - check email
   8:30 - resume programming on current project
   9:15 - take calls from 6 customers, changing scope
  10:00 - go to daily status meeting
  10:12 - everyone else arrives at daily status meeting
  10:48 - drop current project, work on daily emergency
  12:10 - go to lunch at mall foodcourt
   1:00 - check email
   1:10 - resume programming on current project, drop daily emergency
   1:40 - take 4 calls, give project status
   2:00 - go to Special Planning Session for Project #127
   2:12 - others arrive at Special Planning Session for Project #127
   2:48 - candy bar break, bitch with other programmers about code review
   3:10 - resume programming on current project
   4:00 - go to daily stand-up meeting for project status
   4:08 - others arrive at daily stand-up meeting for project status
   4:45 - email project status to 8 bosses
   5:10 - drive home
   5:45 - day ends
   Total work done: 2 hours
My typical day working for a start-up:

   6:00 - code
   8:00 - breakfast at desk while coding
  10:00 - coffee break outside
  10:10 - code
  12:00 - lunch at desk while coding
   2:00 - break outside
   2:15 - work on everything else except coding
   4:00 - review & print code
   5:00 - exercise
   6:00 - dinner with SO
   7:00 - visit mother, watch Jeopardy & Family Guy with her
   8:00 - code
  10:00 - turn off monitor, review code, plan next day
  Total work done: 8 hours

Re: My life in Accenture before startups

#28

Post by wallflower »

I know a few friends who worked for Accenture (back when it was called Andersen Consulting). I always thought the most fascinating thing (aside from the instant credibility of having the company on your resume) was their training program which was designed to take mostly liberal arts majors and teach them C programming (with unknown long-term success but at least enough to not totally drown at a first client engagement). The training program was very intensive and immersive, and I wonder what became of it and if the basic principles of the program could be applied to retraining willing liberal arts graduates.

Re: My life in Accenture before startups

#30

Post by swombat »

wallflower wrote: post #28

I know a few friends who worked for Accenture (back when it was called Andersen Consulting). I always thought the most fascinating thing (aside from the instant credibility of having the company on your resume) was their training program which was designed to take mostly liberal arts majors and teach them C programming (with unknown long-term success but at least enough to not totally drown at a first client engageme…

My information is 4 years old now, so perhaps someone else can pitch in something more up to date, but back then:

- They switched to Java

- Solutions Workforce, being engineers, were expected to already know how to program, and only got a day or two of induction (which was lame)

- Consulting got a 2-week induction (Core Analyst School) + 2 weeks of programming classes, iirc

- Back in the Andersen Consulting days, consultants did do some (generally considered dreadful) programming, but by 2003 they launched the "Solutions Workforce", which was designed to be made up of people who actually knew how to program for longer than 2 weeks

I don't know if they've since dropped the programming classes.

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