Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

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

henricodolfing.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

301–310 of 422 posts

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

#301

Post by balderdash »

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.

I think it’s two things that are pretty basic:

1) decision makers take on less career risk (we hired Accenture and they defrauded us is probably better than we tried to do it ourself and we screwed it up)

2) Larger organizations can’t staff up and build a capability quickly and efficiently in non-core competencies.

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

#302

Post by pugets »

wmeredith wrote: post #80
gumby wrote: post #56

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> If you want to blow a massive development budget AEM is a great choice; otherwise I'd advise you to pick a different content system. It’s tailor made for this. Management will always sign off because they’ve heard of Adobe.

As someone who holds a certification as an AEM Business Solutions Specialist (possibly lapsed by now) I have to agree. It's hot garbage.

How do I transfer out of AEM? I’m a junior dev at a company that uses AEM and I realized long ago that I’m wasting my time with it, but I have trouble landing interviews with AEM as my primary dev experience. I’m not an AEM author, I use Java every day.

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

#303

Post by Aeolun »

CydeWeys wrote: post #276
soulofmischief wrote: post #249

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why do you think this is so difficult?

You can't even get the budget to pay the salaries of good developers at these kinds of companies, for starters.

Clearly they have the budget for a 32M failure. I’m inclined to think they’d be saving money.

Now whether they will or want to (the executives anyway) is a different question.

It’s much easier to tell your boss that the project failed despite the hundreds of developers working on it. Clearly nobody would have been able to do a good job of it.

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

#304

Post by SoftTalker »

djmips wrote: post #288
SoftTalker wrote: post #226

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And "managing expectations." If I heard that phrase once I heard it every day.

As overused as it is, it still has a core usefulness. Over-promising and under-delivering is never a good thing no matter what the situation.

Yes but these big systems consulting companies always over-promise. Once they win the project, they shift immediately to "managing expectations."

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

#305

Post by vxNsr »

SoftTalker wrote: post #250
digitalsin wrote: post #206

I worked at a small company who bid on an RFP against Accenture back in 2000ish. We bid way lower than Accenture and we were already established at the state government agency with a great track record. I remember while the proposal evaluation process was happening, Accenture sent their proposed PM to the town where the agency was based and he literally bought a house there to show Accenture's commitment to the agenc…

Early .NET was basically Java, wasn't it? Java devs should have picked it up pretty easily.

I read somewhere that it was based on Delphi because the same guy made both.

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

#306

Post by Rastonbury »

balderdash wrote: post #301
sytelus wrote: post #114

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I think it’s two things that are pretty basic: 1) decision makers take on less career risk (we hired Accenture and they defrauded us is probably better than we tried to do it ourself and we screwed it up) 2) Larger organizations can’t staff up and build a capability quickly and efficiently in non-core competencies.

Yeah, also what are you gonna do with all the people you hired for a once every few year website overhaul?

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

#307

Post by distances »

allenu wrote: post #229
1123581321 wrote: post #6

A client paid me $7,500 for a site in 2011, approved the final version, but never got around to giving me the hosting information. It never went live. The screenshots were fine portfolio pieces and I spent their money, but I’m still annoyed by that.

That’s not so bad. In my 20+ year career I’ve worked on a ton of projects which were internally killed, so essentially we poured our hearts and souls into products that never saw the light of day. I’m sure I’m not alone in this experience. I figure most of these big companies (including the one I worked at) burn millions each year or efforts that never get shipped. I would say that a lot of times the projects weren’t…

I used to work for a R&D department. We created new things, but nothing went beyond a demo, or some patent applications, or company internal news. It felt that the top brass didn't actually want new things as there always was a danger of cannibalizing some legacy business.

Then I changed to consulting (midsize company, 75-300 people) and it was a breath of fresh air when there actually was a paying customer that wants a working product and will publish it. I really think we did honest, good quality work.

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

#308

Post by Rastonbury »

Tade0 wrote: post #33
bastardoperator wrote: post #4

I'd love to see the statement of work and bill of materials for this. I feel like this isn't Accenture's first rodeo.

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.

This is mainly for interns and T&M, interns juice project profits but regular employees don't really, project managers are incentivized to keep project costs down so they tend to under staff projects rather than staff fillers.

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

#309

Post by hnuaer »

maroonblazer wrote: post #191
simonh wrote: post #153

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Scott Adam’s has this covered. https://dilbert.com/strip/2000-01-01?utm_source=dilbert.com/...

Ha! When I visit the link the page includes several banner ads for...Hertz!

No post body was provided.

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

#310

Post by cjg »

oneoff786 wrote: post #243
Aeolun wrote: post #211

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I’m pretty much convinced you can replace any consulting firm (of any size/developer count) with 4-6 competent in-house developers and have a better product at the end of the year. Regardless of what your project is.

Good luck staffing a team of 4-6 competent in house developers

Pay them a million each and it still works out cheaper.
Post reply on HN