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Hertz paid Accenture $32M for a website that never went live (2019)

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Re: Hertz paid Accenture $32M for a website that never went live (2019)

#141

Post by LightG »

TrackerFF wrote: post #106
pembrook wrote: post #44

It’s impossible to overstate how funny the shenanigans get when you combine a technologically incompetent legacy big Co. with one of these big professional services firms. The IT consulting firm will tell you they have experience with literally everything. They’ll dig up a case study from one of their 400 offices somewhere, claiming to be experts on whatever the topic is. Meanwhile, in actuality, your project will be…

Learning by doing, while billing your clients $xxx/hr The consultant way.

Pfft, my recent experience has been "copying while billing your clients".

Just had a consultant who literally got me to womp up a summary of everything going on (which was pre-existing analysis). They then added it to a PDF with some titles and a bit of fancy colour-shading, and BANG. £Xbillable hours and some expenses to boot. Honestly, the only "added value" they brought was to add on a cumulative growth percentage they obviously pulled out of their ...

Joke.

But I place the blame with the CEO, not the consultant. Consultants gonna "consult".

Re: Hertz paid Accenture $32M for a website that never went live (2019)

#142

Post by tclancy »

dreig wrote: post #92
thechao wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I have this theory that B2B is actually most of the economy; and, that, somehow, real people are only ancillary to that. Like a patina if human customers over a huge mound of B2B ... motion.

But how can that be? At the end of the day some consumer must foot the bill and cover all the additional costs of B2B services. Ultimately businesses are only comfortable paying others businesses because they found a way to make money (i.e. sell to customers, somewhere down the line)

Valuations stopped working on reality some time ago.

Re: Hertz paid Accenture $32M for a website that never went live (2019)

#143

Post by icedchai »

UltimateFloofy wrote: post #52
pembrook wrote: post #44

It’s impossible to overstate how funny the shenanigans get when you combine a technologically incompetent legacy big Co. with one of these big professional services firms. The IT consulting firm will tell you they have experience with literally everything. They’ll dig up a case study from one of their 400 offices somewhere, claiming to be experts on whatever the topic is. Meanwhile, in actuality, your project will be…

I was being billed at > $300/hr when I first got out of school at 21 as consultant. 24 would make someone a senior consultant!

I worked at a defense contractor. They'd pay me like $45/hr and bill me out at like $175 or something. This was the early 2000's after the dot-com crash. When I quit, they offered me like an instant 20% raise despite the fact they were giving 3 or 4% raises for years. Truly pathetic.

Re: Hertz paid Accenture $32M for a website that never went live (2019)

#144

Post by TheMagicHorsey »

I once worked at a startup that came very close to securing a development contract with to build an early App Store like functionality for them. There was a major consulting group, like Accenture, bidding against us. In meetings with us TELCO would relay to us all the wonderful things this consulting company promised, which made absolutely no sense to us given the budget TELCO had given us. We figured the consulting company must already have those capabilities built for other telco clients, and must be benefitting from their massive scale. I figured the TELCO IT team knew how to due diligence these kinds of things well, being that it was their entire job.

We lost the sale because we told TELCO honestly that we could deliver what they wanted in the budget they had set. So TELCO went with the consulting company.

18 months later the consulting company came to us and offered to give us a subcontract to complete the project, within the scope we had originally offered to TELCO, for the same amount we had offered TELCO! We were stunned and could not understand how this could possibly make any sense economically. We had a meeting with the consulting company and took a look at the project status. It was a colossal pile of shit. Nevertheless, the consulting company promised that we would only be responsible for the scope they had laid out, which we were very comfortable delivering.

We were about to sign a contract to do so, and one of our advisors said we should flip the desks, run out of the negotiation, under no circumstances sign the contract, and for good measure close the offices for a month and not answer any phone calls or emails from the consulting company.

According to him getting involved in that project was in the very best case scenario going to destroy our morale and therefore destroy our team. And in the worst case would enmesh us in litigation and ruin all of our careers.

We thought hard about it, because we needed the money, but ultimately we didn't sign the contract.

Years later I met someone who worked for the consulting company and they told me that the project was an internal meme for a colossal disaster and shitshow. Apparently several consultants had nervous breakdowns over it. And one partner left the company. Meanwhile the project never saw light at TELCO.

Re: Hertz paid Accenture $32M for a website that never went live (2019)

#145

Post by JohnGB »

I have a background in electricity regulation and policy analysis. A good friend (who knows nothing about energy regulation or science got assigned as a senior consultant in one of the big 5 consulting firms to advise a national energy producer on their technical and economic strategy for a new plant.

So, she asked me if I could spare a few hours to sit with her and get her up to speed on electricity regulation and policy so that she would "know all about it" for the kickoff meeting in two days time...

Re: Hertz paid Accenture $32M for a website that never went live (2019)

#146

Post by captaincaveman »

pvarangot wrote: post #138
danny_taco wrote: post #128

I was at Accenture Digital, now rebranded as Accenture Song, when Hertz was a client in our office. Most projects had the same issues. I was hired as a developer to work on the front-end of a very ambitious app for one of the biggest oil companies in the world. One year later we delivered a crappy single page app, a relational database and some data pipelines, and in exchange we billed them no less than 20 million. I…

> The only reason these companies are successful is that the top execs are friends with the other execs at fortune 500 companies so they mostly figure out a way to spin it as a success so everyone gets their bonuses even if no value was created. It's also usually that the big companies are so incompetent that paying 20 million dollars for nothing is still cheaper than hiring their own people to do it in house and end…

It's not so much that their own people, i.e. the actual doers are incompetent, its thats the management structure is, so they are set up for failure. And yes it might take longer, and cost more, as they need to hire etc opex, get more scrutiny, can't try and fix the problem by throwing more devs at it at a drop of a hat etc.

Re: Hertz paid Accenture $32M for a website that never went live (2019)

#147

Post by NikolaNovak »

malux85 wrote: post #84
Nextgrid wrote: post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Is there good money to be made though? If idiots are happy to pay more for shit than they do for quality work I'll happily deliver them shit.

Did you read the title? When I was at a consulting firm in London that I wont name, I was charging them 700GBP a day, and they were charging the end client 1500GBP a day (I saw this on an internal presentation slide I was not supposed to see)

The difference between employee salary and effective hourly rate, and billable rate, is not usually particularly secret, and usually doesn't make any sense first time, or even 20th time one sees it. The billable rate is some outer space number with no meaningful connection to real world. If you stick long enough you'll realize that billable rate is not what consulting company charges for you. It's what they charge for you and the non billable boss, senior partner, salesperson, delivery excellence review people, Admin and hr support, half a dozen people who did the bids and proposal, legal, the first phase of the project company did as loss leader, and then for all those things multiplied by contracts not won. this too is not a particular secret either internally or to the client.

If you go as a independent contractor, you can bill close to that rate yourself, but may find that you can't bill quite that rate as the mandatory middle vendors will take their obligatory cut, you need health insurance and your own expenses and any moment you're not working whether between contracts or vacation is lost money. Still makes sense for some people, less for others. Depends on your expertise, preferences, sales and networking skills, and how good is your accountant. Always better to build reputation and then become small consulting company yourself, billing billable rates and paying salary rates to others.

(This is in the world of consulting. Math may be different in world of independent freelance technical developers)

Re: Hertz paid Accenture $32M for a website that never went live (2019)

#148

Post by laserlight »

throckmortra wrote: post #59
rozenmd wrote: post #48

Earlier quoted context omitted.

24 year olds? Since when are they sending the senior consultants out on engagements like this! I lasted not even 6 months working in professional services, really woke me up to what "prestigious careers" really are.

The only consulting firm I've ever heard spoken of somewhat favorably is McKinsey (and then only by ex-McKinsey people)

Why Taxpayers Pay McKinsey $3M a Year for a Recent College Graduate Contractor:

https://mattstoller.substack.com/p/why-taxpayers-pay-mckinse...

Re: Hertz paid Accenture $32M for a website that never went live (2019)

#149

Post by OliverJones »

Hey, I gotta idea. The ocean covers up stuff we want to see. So, let's just boil off the ocean.

Why, oh why, doesn't high-end project management training include case studies of mission-critical systems in large long-lived organizations? Large === hundreds of thousands of people affected. Long-lived === centuries. I'm thinking of, for example, the signaling systems in the New York City subways. You get the idea.

You can't just delete and replace a big system like that like you can a malfunctioning virtual machine at a cloud provider. You have to work with what you have. And, a decade out, you'll still have to work with what you had back then, just less of it.

Any gang of $200/hr fresh-out-of-school devs can do a greenfield system. But maintenance is hard. Upgrading existing business processes without disrupting the business is hard.

In health care, EPIC seems be able (mostly) to do that. Peoplesoft. We don't hear from the govt much, but Social Security seems to be doing it.

What track record of successful business process upgrades do the big-four contractors have? That would be the question to ask.

Re: Hertz paid Accenture $32M for a website that never went live (2019)

#150

Post by sorry_outta_gas »

sytelus wrote: post #114
pembrook wrote: post #44

It’s impossible to overstate how funny the shenanigans get when you combine a technologically incompetent legacy big Co. with one of these big professional services firms. The IT consulting firm will tell you they have experience with literally everything. They’ll dig up a case study from one of their 400 offices somewhere, claiming to be experts on whatever the topic is. Meanwhile, in actuality, your project will be…

The entire business idea of these "services" is to get cheap labor, pay them $30/hr and charge clients $300/hr. Why companies go for this? Because they can't build their own IT, they have failed all the times and their CTO loves golf.

Sometimes, I've worked at consulting shops that actually delivered quality though they were large-ish but not Accenture/IBM sized
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