My life in Accenture before startups

This post really hits home for me. I have friends in consulting and I join a small tech company in bay area instead. I cannot believe when I hear about their experiences with consulting and how miserable they are in their jobs.

The struggle with consulting is that you never get to 'own' any decisions. There is not much accountability between conception, design and implementation. From my experience with big three consulting firms, they are brought in by execs to either 'validate' a path that was already determined or to get contract work done for short-term. In both cases, there is very little impact you can have on the overall business.

In my experience, if you want to be a good entrepreneur, get a job where you can own decisions and implementation. You will make mistakes, but you will learn from them and can implement those learnings in your startup.

A few years ago I quit my job in academia to go work as a field delivery consultant for a large ERP firm. This whole thing was a ridiculous culture shock to me. I quit because I wanted to try something different -- it was different, all right.

For the first year or so I was doing some development work on the client side as well as requirements gathering and dealing with integration. I was cool with this, because I was doing something technical but wanted something that would flex my people skills as well.

At one point I was tasked with requirements gathering for a customer who wanted some custom work done to their installation of our product. They bought two weeks of my time to draft a spec, and no development -- my deliverable was basically to draft the SOW for the next consultant who was to write a technical design for someone else who was to write code.

I finished the spec, in spite of a client who really was extremely hard to deal with. The client sat on it for a few months and decided they wanted to revisit the issue, so I got on a plane again and spent two more weeks trying to tease some answers out of them so I could revise things.

The final specification amounted to approximately 95 pages including screenshot mockups. The spec went back to the home office, where our development team reviewed it and quoted something like three or four months' time to develop it, test it, and hand off back to the customer for acceptance testing. They planned for the invariable back and forth on that as well. This was in February of that particular year; they were looking at taking the feature live on January 1 of the following year.

The feature they requested? Four simple web forms, the code to validate their input, and a report generator to dump back out what was put into the form.

After we finalized the spec for this I turned in my two weeks and went straight back to academia, where four web forms and a report is something you write, wrap automated tests around, and deploy before lunchtime.

You should make sure you get an internship.

I hated school by the time I had my undergraduate CS degree. I took two years in industry, realized I hated it far more than I could have ever imagined, now I am very happy in a PhD program. You need to work to get the perspective (and also to find the useful problems to solve).

Every one of my colleagues and me find the couple of people who eat in the cubicles next to us incredibly rude.

Both are either managers or team leads so there's not a lot of volunteers to inform them of this. Although there have been subtle hints, but no one has picked up on the clues yet.

And both are very proud of giving it 110%, hence the eat and work at the same time show. Which is a joke, because one of them often eats with a knife and fork. How much coding is he really getting done while doing that?

But we do have the noise of the utensils and the glass dishes to enjoy, along with the smell of the food and the other noises which tend to accompany eating.

So for all of you out there, eating at your desks at work. Please stop!

I guarantee you, your neighbors don't like it. It's a mess. You're not fooling anyone into thinking you're working extra hard because you're eating at your desk. An office is not a lunch room. Do yourself and everyone else a favor and take a short lunch break.

> he feature they requested? Four simple web forms, the code to validate their input, and a report generator to dump back out what was put into the form. After we finalized the spec for this I turned in my two weeks and went straight back to academia, where four web forms and a report is something you write, wrap automated tests around, and deploy before lunchtime.

I think this is a very uneven comparison. Comparing what a decent coder can do as to what is spec'd, negotiated and sold is wildly different.

At the heart of the problem is that consulting agencies and ISVs like Accenture benefit from more "work" being done, so they sell more "work". The product delivered is a consequence.