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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)

#231

Post by bckr »

BurningFrog wrote: post #186
ctrager wrote: post #152

Earlier quoted context omitted.

LOL and true to my experience. In the 80's was a United Airlines employee on a project where Arthur Anderson (aka Accenture) was the consultant. The project included approximately 75 entry level AA programmers that were brought to the office on two big buses. My job was to write specs for them. The specs had to be 100% detailed, every "if", every "loop", except that I had to follow the AA methodology and write the en…

Say what you will about the Jira process, there is no climbing involved...

Perfect opportunity for a new corpspeak term.

"Let's sync this week for the pre-sprint Jira climbing"

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

#233

Post by illuminati1911 »

dustingetz wrote: post #215
hsbauauvhabzb wrote: post #151

Earlier quoted context omitted.

If you deliver shit then they keep coming back to you to fix it. Pretty sure there are major consulting firms playing that game.

it’s not that they want to fail delivery; it’s that any new small agile firm of like 10 people who manages to qualify and deliver in some small project will instantly have so much demand that they will scale from 10 to 100 people in short order until they cannot effectively manage and turn into the the thing they hate. and contracting is low margin after bizdev costs, the economics really aren’t there so you make mon…

This is not really true at least everywhere. In Europe and especially North Europe smaller (less than 1000 ppl) consultancies are usually the most lax and best paid jobs with best benefits out there and the best ones definitely do raise their rates.

It's just about what kind of clients you want to work with. If you pick any client that comes to your door and never say no then you'll end up in the race to the bottom with these large outsourcing corps.

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

#235

Post by solraph »

smsm42 wrote: post #74
wgx wrote: post #22

The UK’s NHS can top that, with the infamous Capita contract that cost billions and delivered nothing.

One expects this kind of behavior from the government, but business setting huge pile of cash on fire still attracts attention.

Honestly, having worked directly & indirectly for a multitude of large enterprises over the last couple of decades, every large organisation suffers from this.

It doesn't matter if their private, local, state, or federal government, charity, or whatever - the larger the organisation, the less efficient, and more failed projects there will be.

My personal opinion is that this is caused by a combination of communication overhead, politics, and larger organisations giving more places for useless / lazy people to hide.

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

#236

Post by SoftTalker »

stats111 wrote: post #222

Accenture and other large SI firms are responsible for the majority of public and private sector complex and large software delivery projects. Many of them are resoundingly successful and deliver a great deal of value to businesses and their end users. Some do go wrong due to poor management and individual failures, but it would be unfair to tarnish entire industries based on these isolated incidents (full disclosure…

I worked for Accenture's previous encarnation (Andersen Consulting) in the early 1990s. It was my first job, I was a staff consultant. I obviously was not privy to the higher levels of the project and I left after a year for a better opportunity, so I also don't know how the project ended up. But everything seemed well run (if heavyweight on staff) and we delivered well tested code that worked.

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

#237

Post by noahjk »

Nextgrid wrote: post #57
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.

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.

I accepted an offer this year for $150k as a sr assoc at a big 4 consultancy doing "dev" work, so for me, it was worth it. 3 years as a dev before

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

#239

Post by cratermoon »

patja wrote: post #190
cratermoon wrote: post #178

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Your firm was charging just over 2x, but in the US it's not uncommon to see the client billed 3x what the consultant makes. This is especially true if there are subcontractors.

Pretty sure i was billed at 10x when I started at Andersen Consulting in 1990. My starting salary was 21.5k.

I don't doubt it, for one of the Big Names. I know 3x is common even in smaller shops. I don't doubt that places like Wipro, Infosys and the other big names that work the US H-1B market have much larger markups.

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

#240

Post by eternalban »

game_the0ry wrote: post #189
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 is so bizarre that blowing $20M on a large, complex project that obviously fails can be rebranded as success. Its harder to pull that off with smaller projects and less st…

>> a very ambitious app for one of the biggest oil companies in the world

An oil major probably makes $20MM in profit every few minutes or at most in an hour. (Apple makes ~1700.00 per second ..)

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