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

raise rates to what? from $260 per hour (USA) to $300? there’s only so much a client can optically tolerate, the proposals are already fine tuned to the same maximum as everyone else. same problem in legal industry, you can’t get the partner bill rate up to $5k/hr (how rude) but you can bill 10 associates to “research” at $500

The large scale consulting firms collectively pull in hundreds of billions of dollars of revenue per year and they're mostly _okay_, you just don't hear about them because nobody writes a front page HN article about "that one time I paid Deloitte $300k to implement an internal dashboard and it turned out mediocre".

I've been part of a handful of these projects. You have to understand that these types of projects are, from the start, never intended to be smashing successes. Nobody says "everything is going great and we have a ton of smart, capable people working here, we should also hire some consultants". No, once your company or project is at the phase where you're hiring consultants, 9 times out of 10 its because shit has hit the fan and you need someone to pull you out of the mud, and quick. Consulting engagements are almost always band-aid fixes just trying to achieve a level of mediocrity.

And as much as people shit on the "24 year olds who don't know anything", the sad truth is that 24 year olds (aka people with 2-3 years experience in consulting that are now on their 8th project doing this exact same type of implementation) may not have much experience, but they still are probably more productive than the vast majority of knuckle dragging drones that work in corporate america. When I was one of those 24 year old consultants, most of my projects were roles where I was supporting "IT admins" who literally had trouble remembering how to open Excel. The people that these consultants are meant to supplement aren't your "average HN commenter", they're not even "average redditor". They're "average facebook poster".

I know that some consulting shops are sweat shops like you describe, but not all are. I worked for one of the major consulting Big4s and my experience couldn't be more different (except for spending most weeks out of town).

I was there for 5 years, and with the exception of one single project that lasted 1.5 months, all of my teams would leave the office no later than 6pm, and not once did I or anyone I ever worked with ever go back to the office later in the night. Once we gathered at the hotel bar after dinner with our laptops to practice a presentation we were giving the next day, but that's it.

It also wasn't difficult at all to develop a life outside of the company, even with the weekly travel. I spent a lot of time with coworkers, yes, but on most of my teams I genuinely enjoyed that time (and even long after leaving I am still close friends with many of them). We had hobbies together (would go to the gym together sometimes, explored different neighborhoods in town, played video games together, watched sports together, etc). If you're the type of person that thinks "work is only for work and therefor I can never be 'friends' with a coworker", then consulting isn't for you, but not everyone is like that.

The work-life balance and the general fun that I had were my favorite parts of consulting. I left because I found that every project I was on was inherently a "this company is full of incompetent morons and so they're hiring a bunch of mediocre consultants to come in and hold everyone's hand", and after several years it just got exhausting to always be the adult in the room.

ERP implementations likely provided value because of the lack of bespoke systems, instead people standardized and gained efficiencies. That was the value I would guess.

Outsourcing? Did it provide value? Maybe immediately on the books, enough to cook to hit the stock options and cash out.

Could companies have built internally? In an ideal world that's definitely a yes. Amazon sucks in so many ways, but one thing they don't is the fundamental value they place on their IT systems and workers.

Old school companies could not handle that culturally. Ugly nerds? Paid more than managers would be several levels up? Treat them respect? Structure the business around them? They couldn't handle it.

Accenture had the organizational gravitas with the execs. Through that came the temporary infusion of valued IT change. Were they vastly overpaying? Yeah. But that price tag meant they needed to take the implemented system seriously.

Ultimately Accenture kept showing up and selling services somehow, despite many many many other options. Should there be a kick-ass IT consultancy that competes with them and embarrasses them? Probably, but ... where are they? If Accenture was charging 250/hr for 50/hr talent, why didn't some leaner org at 150/hr with 100/hr talent (a fundamentally different tier of worker) vastly outperform them?

Well, the world is run by the rich, and they only respect the rich. It might be as cynical as they respect how Accenture rips off its workers and still delivers acceptable product, exactly like the execs in the companies like their companies to be run: extracting maximum value from the plebe workers.

Marketing and connections are so so powerful. As stated elsewhere, Accenture is generally a "safe" choice for an "important" project. And don't forget those "approved vendors" rigamarole that companies have. Because Accenture and their ilk extract so much excess from clients and labor, they can buffer the failure scenarios and throw more labor at the problem.

In large companies where budgets are abstract in relation to value, more that budgets align with how much power and influence a subsection of the org has, cost can become secondary.

And sweet jesus would I like to know how much kickbacks and the like exist in IT procurement. It must be extensive, based on the mystifying decisions I've seen in my career.