My life in Accenture before startups

Interesting. Can you elaborate on review & print code?

Example of the decline? What would have been more appropriate in your opinion?

I left Accenture (Italy) this january, after 3 years, and just like you I was hired right after graduation thanks to my 'mad' java skills, after about 1 year I wasn't writing much code anymore and SQL, Word & Excel became my only daily companions.

Negatives/things I didn't like during my experience in Accenture:

  - Working 10-14 hours a day (^). If you were to leave at 6pm your supervisor 
  would joke about it ("hey, did you get that part-time thing?").
  It's alienating and can be done only if you're young & single. 
  You are supposed to immolate yourself for the company.

  - Procedures & timetables to fill: I were required to follow the 
  most cumbersome procedures even for the simplier tasks and file every 
  single small detail of what I've done in a form somewhere for monitoring 
  purposes. 
  While this is a good practice in general, what was going on there 
  was beyond absurdity. I spent more time reporting what I was doing 
  than working on the actual task.

  - Dressing code = compulsory business attire, Suite + tie (!)

  - Managers overlydramatic speeches. Laughable attitude.

  - Strong pyramidal scheme. If your non-technical supervisor closed a deal 
  with the client on a specific feature, it didn't matter if it was technically 
  unfeasible and risked to put in jeopardy the whole system, you were -ordered- 
  to do it. obey. Reworking was then very common.

  - What matter isn't the quality of your work, it's the amount of time 
  you spend on it. You're consultants and your company charges the client by 
  the hours you do. The more you stay in the office, the better is for the company. 
  Optimization? who cares.

  - Most of my coworkers there were really, really, really bored. 
  Their life was sucked into the office, and the only thought they had on a 
  typical monday morning was how to make it through the next weekend.

Positives:

  - I found some truly talented people, and I learned lots of both technical 
  and people skills.

  - You get to learn some self-discipline, especially when it comes to schedule 
  your time to reach specific goals.

  - On a professional point of view, I grew up a lot, it's a good 'gym', 
  an eye-opener.

Anyway, in all honesty, I'm glad I've been working there and I do not regret it at all. If I were to run a startup right after university, I would have bit off more than I could chew, probably.

(^) I don't mind working 10-14 on my own stuff, things that I'm crafting with my hands and that I find exciting. Pretending to work 14 hours on a bi-monthly report just because you've got to leave at the same time as everybody else is another thing.

That was one of the reasons why i politely declined when i was asked if i was interested in a interview for the consulting branch. A place where people with zero experience are hired, trained in a few weeks and them sent to some client as a "consultant"? No, thanks...

I spent a number of years working as an employee of one of the big IT outsourcers on a Australian government department (better not say which one) contract. During this time I was required to assist a team from Accenture who had won a contract to write some software that needed to be integrated with a number of systems.

Accenture had "all their best people" on the job. This meant almost an entire floor of staff; managers, project managers, BAs, god knows what else. Oh, they also had two young devs, you know, to actually do the work. These two guys were nice, seemed pretty smart, but fresh out of uni had no experience at all and were just so far out of their depth it was embracing. I tried to help them where I could, but didn't get much opportunity.

Accenture originally gave a timeframe of three years for this project, but when I left they were two years in and still not even a working demo in sight. I have no idea if it was ever completed or what happened