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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)

#311

Post by Aperocky »

woevdbz wrote: post #183

When people say "software is eating the world," this is what they are talking about. When mastering the software development cycle becomes a strong differentiator in an industry, inept companies (like Hertz in this case) get fleeced by rent-a-coder firms that get paid the same no matter the usefulness or reusability of their code. They end up, hopefully, spiralling into irrelevance while competitors who are able to h…

> aging digital presence

Never had any problem renting cars online from hertz, unsure what the problem is.

Since renting apparently works fine, the backend APIs seems to be working.

A page redesign? I can not care less what the page looked like as long as I can find the rent botton.

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

#312

Post by Rastonbury »

Ken_At_EM wrote: post #175

I really don’t understand how Accenture is as big as they are or how they truly provide value to the world. I just don’t understand it. Im not trying to be sarcastic. I’ve been scratching my head trying to understand this since I created my own consulting firm years ago. Please, sincerely, explain it to me.

Because failures like these are rare every few years and Accenture does several hundred projects of this size a year. If you need a tech consultancy for any project above 100 people they really are one of the first choices, if you upgrade SAP or any system touched by more than a few thousand people Accenture is likely on the top of the Head of IT's mind, and that's if they can afford them.

Once a company reaches a sufficient size, they need someone like Accenture, its really as simple as that. Every FAANG or F500, really none of them do it themselves. Why would they do use any of their own expensive engineers on their back-end systems. The value is in outsourcing to someone with economies of scale for several months instead of hiring FTEs or reallocating existing staff for an x month project every 5 years.

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

#313

Post by [deleted] »

blantonl wrote: post #131
naet wrote: post #14

"Content Management – Adobe Experience Manager (AEM) was the tool of choice to update and revise the content that appears on the website." 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. This decision alone probably sunk multiple millions of dollars. The platform license alone for their operating scale was probably a half million or…

IBM WebSphere enters the chat...

[deleted]

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

#314

Post by listenallyall »

ctrager wrote: post #152
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.

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…

Just curious, but in the 1980's, what viable alternatives did you have to pen and paper? Did Visio exist? Did any flowchart tools exist, for DOS? For Apple ][? If they did, could you navigate, or print, a hundreds-to-thousands page flowchart in one of those OS'es?

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

#315

Post by zhte415 »

eternalban wrote: post #240
game_the0ry wrote: post #189

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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 ..)

Motivation and constraint is completely driven by what budget or cost centre one's in. These can be schizophrenically distant, and work to the detriment of the organisation, in organisations that still insist they're one team.

Another perspective on the 20M is the salaries and total running cost of an office of 1500 in Southeast Asia for ayear (or potentially Latin America, or Africa, but I'm less familiar with pricing there than in EA/SEA).

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

#316

Post by listenallyall »

nazka wrote: post #201
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…

I’m not even sure insane match what you just described at that point. Now I know someone that do that for the software for subparts of nuclear reactors and it’s exactly all the same. The specs, the time to review, the politics of hierarchy, the time to fix a simple bug (can take 2 weeks for a simple if)… But at least the specs are in a software.

If you were building a nuclear reactor, would you err on the side of too much documentation, oversight, and code review, or too little?

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

#317

Post by lmm »

dreig wrote: post #92
thechao wrote: post #41

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I have this theory that B2B is actually most of the economy; and, that, somehow, real people are only ancillary to that. Like a patina if human customers over a huge mound of B2B ... motion.

But how can that be? At the end of the day some consumer must foot the bill and cover all the additional costs of B2B services. Ultimately businesses are only comfortable paying others businesses because they found a way to make money (i.e. sell to customers, somewhere down the line)

Some executive had the budget for it, it wasn't paid for out of his pocket. They can't get outcompeted by a more efficient competitor because every big business is like this. In some fields smaller competitors can eat their lunch, but the dinosaurs persist because they make so much surplus by being big. Hertz charges what, 3x what your local no-name car rental place charges for the same product? But a business traveller doesn't care because they're expensing it and just want whoever's got a spot at the airport.

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

#318

Post by lmm »

AtlasBarfed wrote: post #122
tootie wrote: post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

My only interaction with Accenture was years ago. They air-dropped like 100 recent grads and few account managers to build a very complex system like 1000 monkeys at 1000 typewriters. And I know for a fact they used underhanded techniques to maintain their foothold at the expense of the quality of the product.

I'd be fascinated to know if they still do this. That was the Accenture model in the 80s and 90s, but then they went hard for outsourcing. Maybe TCS outbid them on the low end and they're pivoting back to inshore

I know someone who's a low-level manager there, most of her team is in India. You tend to get the onshore team for show for the first few weeks and then they shift you onto the cheaper team.

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

#319

Post by illuminati1911 »

kumarvvr wrote: post #245

IT Companies, especially ones that outsource have had it coming for years. I am an Indian (though I only worked for a year in IT before leaving for actual work), and let me tell you, we Indian IT developers are a complex bunch. 3 out of 100 know the actual work, actual technology, impact of choices, etc. 80 out of 100 just get by, as in, do the bare minimum required to get by the day and the task assigned to them. Th…

The global economy and free market will always make sure that the talented people will receive higher compensation. It doesn't matter if someone outsources to India or not, but if you are getting something for really cheap you are buying shit and being scammed. There are obviously good high quality Indian developers too, but they are not going to be working for these low cost sweatshops that get contracts from Fortune 500 legacy corps.

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

#320

Post by sytelus »

InefficientRed wrote: post #241
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.

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'd say this is rather distribution at work. To build software competitively you need fairly good people and not a lot them would want to end up at Hertz. Places like Hertz are not tech companies which also often makes them very low margine, capital deprived and of limited scalability. Therefore, they cannot offer the compensation like top 20% of the players. The difference of compensation between top 20% and rest of the players is just amazing and reflects market forces operating in talent distribution that has sharp peak than other professions.

Software development requires placing millions of bytes exactly at right places to make billions of transitors sing and dance in precise sequence about billion times a second, every second. This is of complexity unlike anything humanity has ever encountered before.

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