My main question is: who hires Accenture for this kind of job, for no less than $32m??? They would be my last point of call, literally after my mum, and maybe even after my dog. At least he's cheap.
Hertz paid Accenture $32M for a website that never went live (2019)
331–340 of 422 posts
Re: Hertz paid Accenture $32M for a website that never went live (2019)
#332It's the old "nobody ever get fired for buying IBM". It is easy to justify this kind of outsourcing decision, these are multi-billion dollar companies and they must be that successful for a reason. Right? Whereas if you do something in house and it goes titsup, then the first question will be "why didn't you get an experienced consultancy to do it?"
So my question is how do we influence senior management away from the mentality of employing consultants as they default decision and instead look at all the options fairly.
Re: Hertz paid Accenture $32M for a website that never went live (2019)
#333Re: Hertz paid Accenture $32M for a website that never went live (2019)
#334Earlier quoted context omitted.
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…
This is why these large companies often form "innovation" units that are spun out as separate entities or at lest setup as separate orgs sheltered from internal politics by the C suite. It's possible. But it's really hard work, very politically expensive, and extremely high risk. So, yeah, not surprising.
Re: Hertz paid Accenture $32M for a website that never went live (2019)
#335A 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…
Re: Hertz paid Accenture $32M for a website that never went live (2019)
#336Earlier quoted context omitted.
Hertz hired a new CIO in 2015, and you can't just come in and keep the ship running in the same direction. You need new, big, flashy changes! Not just $32M, actually over $400M in changes, to prove the CIO knows what he's doing. Compare the article with the CIO's self provided description of his 3 years at Hertz(from his Linkedin): > I was hired by Hertz to integrate and optimize technology infrastructure following t…
>My Achievements Include [...] These all look like your typical resume inflating BS. Reminds me of the Silicon Valley series satire from Mike Judge.
He hasn't heard about gradient descent, not by name, not by maths. He was quite impressed when I described it to him, in fact.
If it didn't happen to me, and i still have written records, i wouldn't believe it today.
Re: Hertz paid Accenture $32M for a website that never went live (2019)
#337Out of curiousity, what would the HN crowd recommend for the tech stack for a project like this? They had Angular, Mulesoft, and some other cruft I'm sure thrown in. What technology/languages/frameworks would work well enough to support Hertz and their subsidiaries for now and into the future? Here's what I'd choose as someone who hasn't done something like this in his 25 year career: Some front-end framework (is Rea…
- Monolithic Haskell web application.
- Very little JavaScript.
- Small team of people who know what they're doing.
- A couple of servers.
- Postgres and Redis.
With the remaining $31,500,000, I would buy weapons for Ukraine.
Re: Hertz paid Accenture $32M for a website that never went live (2019)
#338It’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 amount of bureaucratic inefficiency in large businesses made me want to tear my hair out. Half the people I worked with knew absolutely nothing except how to protect their own jobs.
Re: Hertz paid Accenture $32M for a website that never went live (2019)
#339Re: Hertz paid Accenture $32M for a website that never went live (2019)
#340As far as I can tell, this sort of over-promise, under-deliver, bill-huge thing is pretty normal for these massive consulting companies. Their big name experts come in, tell you how you're doing it all wrong and they have the best solution around for only $X million and they can deliver in 12 months. Management nods, gives the greenlight, tells you to cooperate fully with them. Their layers of consultants then tie up…
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.
If things go wrong, you get to blame the outside company for screwing it up.
Setup a team internally and your neck is on the line if they fail to deliver.