Sometimes a big budget is detrimental to project success.
With a small budget you are forced to find or assemble a small skilled team. With a big budget you end up funding a bureaucracy of middle managers and a big unskilled team.
Hertz paid Accenture $32M for a website that never went live (2019)
161–170 of 422 posts
Re: Hertz paid Accenture $32M for a website that never went live (2019)
#162Did Hertz not buy the "Quality Insurance" when they hired Accenture?
Re: Hertz paid Accenture $32M for a website that never went live (2019)
#163Earlier quoted context omitted.
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!
My first 'agency' gig was late 90s - I was making $21/hr, and being billed out at .. $175/hr I think. Varied a bit, but most billing was $150-$180 when I started, and I think most new projects were $180-$200/hr by the time I left (20 months later) 1998 - walking around you saw dozens of copies of "ASP for Dummies" on various desks. I started at $21/hr, then found out later some other folks hired after me came in even…
I worked at a computer store in my local town for a while. I got paid $9.00/hr repairing Macs and PCs. Often having 7-8 on my bench at a time. All were being billed at $59/hr. I didn't stick around long!
Re: Hertz paid Accenture $32M for a website that never went live (2019)
#164Earlier quoted context omitted.
I was an intern in Accenture in 2010. My general impression was that my role was actually "budget filler". Saved up for a laptop and a driving course, so can't complain.
Billable Hours! This is why contracts should be outcome based and not based on hours. I don't care if the solution takes you ten days, or 10 minutes, it's the outcome that matters.
Yeah--improper incentives cause all kinds of problems.
Once there was an enormous tanker truck fire under an overpass in the Bay Area on a major freeway. A section of the overpass collapsed.
The state asked for bids, but the contract had an interesting feature: substantial sums would be paid for each calendar day the work was completed ahead of schedule.
One contractor underbid everyone by a substantial margin, and got to work 24-7.
Wikipedia:
A contractor with a proven track record of rebuilding damaged freeways (most notably the Santa Monica Freeway after the 1994 Northridge earthquake) well ahead of schedule, C. C. Myers, Inc., submitted a winning bid of $876,075 to repair the damage to the I-580 connector. The bid was estimated to cover only one-third of the cost of the work, but the firm counted on making up the shortfall with an incentive of $200,000 per day if the work was completed before June 27, 2007.
On the evening of Thursday, May 24, the I-580 connector re-opened, just before the busy Memorial Day weekend. The deadline to finish the project was beaten by over a month, with the contractor earning the $5 million bonus for early completion. The entire reconstruction project was completed only 26 days after the original accident.
Re: Hertz paid Accenture $32M for a website that never went live (2019)
#165Earlier quoted context omitted.
The only consulting firm I've ever heard spoken of somewhat favorably is McKinsey (and then only by ex-McKinsey people)
A lot of those ex-McKinsey people ended up at Enron, at least for a while... http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2002/07/22/the-talent-myth
Enron sounds eerily familiar to today's tech companies...
Re: Hertz paid Accenture $32M for a website that never went live (2019)
#166Earlier quoted context omitted.
The only consulting firm I've ever heard spoken of somewhat favorably is McKinsey (and then only by ex-McKinsey people)
A lot of those ex-McKinsey people ended up at Enron, at least for a while... http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2002/07/22/the-talent-myth
If you’re discussing Enron and consulting you could just go straight for Accenture’s predecessor: Arthur Andersen which was the responsible party.
Re: Hertz paid Accenture $32M for a website that never went live (2019)
#167Out of curiousity, what would the HN crowd recommend for the tech stack for a project like this? They had Angular, Mulesoft, and some other cruft I'm sure thrown in. What technology/languages/frameworks would work well enough to support Hertz and their subsidiaries for now and into the future? Here's what I'd choose as someone who hasn't done something like this in his 25 year career: Some front-end framework (is Rea…
To be fair, mulesoft is not an obstacle here, it lets you expose a http API using the built-in components, generate an OAS description pretty easily. Performance can be shaky but just chuck Varnish in front and hire a guy who knows how to read GC logs for a week to tune the STW-pauses and presto, you can handle >10k r/s on a laptop.
Re: Hertz paid Accenture $32M for a website that never went live (2019)
#168Large corporations and states have increasing inefficiencies of scale. I remember reading an article posted on HN about a guy who got paid $17K for a static HTML page.
Full Time Employee is a funny institution in many countries. Leave a comment below if you had ever (or regularly) been asked to report 8 hours a day on a time sheet even if you actually worked 4.
You have to find different project codes to make it “look right”. If you feel bad and bring up to your manager that you have some downtime, it becomes their problem and they have to find you more work but then you might be overloaded other times. So most people don’t rock the boat, why bother?
So around the country, most FTE jobs in large corporations are like this. People sitting around the watercooler or in meetings, getting lunch and doing one or two things per day. Government employees, too.
With the rise of automation, we’ll have even more productivity. Hopefully with UBI people can start being more honest and work 20 hour workweeks, and spend the rest of the time with their family or pursuing hobbies.
Re: Hertz paid Accenture $32M for a website that never went live (2019)
#169It’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…
have seen it described in telecom industry as "dinosaurs mating"
…moments before the asteroid strikes.
Re: Hertz paid Accenture $32M for a website that never went live (2019)
#170The big4 (D, EY, Accenture, EY) are the absolute last people I would call for any tech project, ever. I worked in one (very briefly) and could not understand why anyone with a modicum of technical experience would pick them for technical work. They can do good work for some things, like regulation, audit, tax, etc -- there's a decent chance that whoever wrote the regulation you have to comply with works for one of th…
Isn't the big 4 usually KPMG, EY, Deloitte, and PWC?
yes - Big 4 Auditors. For some reason, people also use Big 4 to refer to big technical implementation/System Integration consulting shops too, even though there are clearly more than four: Deloitte, EY, KPMG, Accenture, IBM, etc. Cognizant and Capgemini are creeping up there too