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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)

#291

Post by cjdoc »

solraph wrote: post #217
0xCAP wrote: post #103

I've never witnessed a single skilled professional working at Accenture in 10+ years of IT career. Period.

Agreed. At this point, I view anyone who worked for more than six months at any of the big IT consulting companies - and especially accounting firms pretending to be IT consulting companies - with deep suspicion. I've literally witnessed teams where a single contractor out-performed a team of twenty people by a factor of 10 because they were reasonably competent. I guess this is where the myth of the 10x programmer c…

Using a throwaway here, but I stayed at Accenture for much too long (years). I ended up moving to a household-name tech company and never looked back. This move was not intentional. Despite having glowing performance reviews as an hands-on engineer, my business group felt my skills were mismatched. And they were - they wanted specific certified consultants in the business group and my expertise was building general cloud-native systems.

The very unfortunate thing is most of my ex-colleagues have climbed the ladder to a point with no perceived way down or up. They think they are “managers” and believe they are equivalent to one in tech, but no tech company wants some 7+ year tenure Accenture “manager” managing their engineering teams when all they’ve done is sent out product specs to an offshore team. Even if that offshore team is awful, they’re still doing the hard work of architecting and creating the code. The onshore “manager” is just a face for the team.

Some are genuinely good at their job, but they’ll need to transition to non-tech F500 companies to do anything with a similar prestige to what they’re doing now.

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

#292

Post by bigiain »

IncRnd wrote: post #246
bckr wrote: post #231

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Perfect opportunity for a new corpspeak term. "Let's sync this week for the pre-sprint Jira climbing"

Waterfall is so last week. Properly scheduled climbing projects meet MVP more often!

Yeah, Sooo over Waterfall. We do Wagile here!

(Hey, what are the worst bits of waterfall and agile? Let's combine them into our methodology!)

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

#293

Post by muzani »

vsareto wrote: post #109
orf wrote: post #38

> In its revised suit, Hertz states that Accenture represented that they had “the best talent in the world" > Hertz claims that they were far from experts in these technologies and that Accenture was deceptive in their marketing claims. Colour me surprised. > Accenture also failed to test the software, Hertz claims, and when it did do tests "they were seriously inadequate, to the point of being misleading." It didn't…

The more stories I hear about this, the more I'm inclined to be an executive-asleep-at-the-wheel because apparently they get paid a lot, do a terrible job, and nothing happens to them.

At one point, I got sick of interviewing for tech jobs, so I searched "CEO" on job portals and found a surprising number of very well paid jobs I nearly qualified for (just need to learn to read financial statements better).

I ended up taking a tech job anyway but once I retire from this, I'll probably apply to an executive-asleep-at-the-wheel job.

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

#294

Post by EddySchauHai »

djmips wrote: post #287
EddySchauHai wrote: post #113

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Perhaps, but their contributions to the opiate epidemic in the US makes me dislike the company - I know I'd never work there.

Accord to another article McKinsey "encouraged ICE to give less food and medical care to detainees." https://mattstoller.substack.com/p/why-taxpayers-pay-mckinse...

> Such practices used to be called “honest graft.” And let’s be clear, McKinsey’s services are very expensive. Back in August, I noted that McKinsey’s competitor, the Boston Consulting Group, charges the government $33,063.75/week for the time of a recent college grad to work as a contractor. Not to be outdone, McKinsey’s pricing is much much higher, with one McKinsey “business analyst” - someone with an undergraduate degree and no experience - lent to the government priced out at $56,707/week, or $2,948,764/year.

And not for a cheap fee either!

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

#295

Post by zinekeller »

hadleybelter wrote: post #273
zinekeller wrote: post #171

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That's the big four accounting firms. They're referring to the big four consultancy firms (which arguably isn't just four, and EY happens to be in). Also, Accenture was the consulting division of Arthur Andersen (which is involved in the Enron scandal).

The big 4 accounting firms are also the big 4 consulting firms. Deloitte, PwC, EY, and KPMG all have both large accounting arms as well as massive consulting arms. There's also the "Big 3" or "MBB" which refers to the big 3 prestigious strategy consulting firms, Mckinsey, Bain, and BCG. And then on the other end of the spectrum there's "WITCH" which is the consulting firms generally known as "body shops" that hire fo…

Unrelated to this discussion, but

> FAANG

I always hated that acronym, mainly because it classifies Netflix under the same umbrella as Microsoft (while I'll acknowledge that they're tech-savvy, Netflix has been (and still is) mainly a media company).

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

#297

Post by the_af »

cjdoc wrote: post #291
solraph wrote: post #217

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Agreed. At this point, I view anyone who worked for more than six months at any of the big IT consulting companies - and especially accounting firms pretending to be IT consulting companies - with deep suspicion. I've literally witnessed teams where a single contractor out-performed a team of twenty people by a factor of 10 because they were reasonably competent. I guess this is where the myth of the 10x programmer c…

Using a throwaway here, but I stayed at Accenture for much too long (years). I ended up moving to a household-name tech company and never looked back. This move was not intentional. Despite having glowing performance reviews as an hands-on engineer, my business group felt my skills were mismatched. And they were - they wanted specific certified consultants in the business group and my expertise was building general c…

Making a "career" at one of these dead-end IT consulting firms is a real danger every tech person should be aware of.

I mean, if you don't get fired, make a nice salary, and you don't care about actually doing interesting work with technology, then I suppose it's not that bad.

If you try to change jobs, especially if you decide you wanted to actually learn real tech, it's a real burden.

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

#298

Post by kavrick »

I am not surprised by a single thing in this article. My parents local rental car company was purchased by Hertz 20 years ago and I got to see first hand the IT mess they brought to the acquisition.

Funny enough, when Hertz brought DTAG (Dollar / Thrifty) they might have purchased part ownership of a software Company called BlueBird Systems which developed a modern front end system built on Progress, which was light years ahead of Hertz internal nonsense at the time according to people I spoke with.

The car rental software world was a weird and wonderful place. They even had their own operating systems called SuperDos once upon a time specifically built to run dumb terminals throught multi-mux's over phone lines. When Enterprise innovated and used satellites to connect their locations together, the industry thought they were mad. Turns out their ability to do real time yeild management of their fleets was a game changer and enabled them to grow at an astounding pace and unseated Hertz very quickly.

The entire industry is filled with crazy consolidation, public / private takeovers and companies thinking their way is the better way to do it. Astounding levels of tech debt, hubris, money and larger than life personalities. A near perfect ecosystem for consultant grift.

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

#299

Post by the_af »

bastardoperator wrote: post #97
Tade0 wrote: post #33

Earlier 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.

Careful with that thought.

This is a case where this was "gamed" by Accenture and Hertz was just clueless, but it can happen the other way around. (Unreasonable) outcome based, and the contracting firm gets stuck with an impossible, money-losing project. Or some unexpected thing happens and same result.

There's a reason why billable hours is a thing.

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

#300

Post by buscoquadnary »

CSMastermind wrote: post #264
InefficientRed wrote: post #241

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Because they have no idea how to hire and manage teams that build software. It's a lot harder than it sounds if you have no personal experience delivering software (read: most legacy corp CTOs).

I've found myself wondering recently how much impact I could have at one of these large companies if given a modest budget and a mandate to build a high performing engineering org. I've spent my career at startups and growth companies building and scaling engineering orgs. So I take it as a given that I could get a highly capable team but wonder how much it would matter. Would we still be weighed down by internal bur…

The problem isn't just the experience or capabilities it's the internal politics.

You have dozens of people with competing interests some of who are actively working against you and the C suite doesn't know what is really going on our what to do because all the information they are receiving is intentionally being distorted by people trying to spin it so they can keep creeping up the ladder.

The biggest enemy of a large organization is almost always itself.

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