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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)

#351

Post by jsty »

Aeolun wrote: post #303
CydeWeys wrote: post #276

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

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

The company would, but the relevant executive would be worse off. A $xx million consulting engagement failing is the consulting firm’s fault (politically speaking). Hiring and directing a $y million team that fails is the fault of the exec in charge.

Executives in large companies are frequently not the bumbling idiots they’re portrayed as - their decisions make perfect sense in terms of protecting and advancing influence within the company, which wins out over good execution in driving decisions.

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

#352

Post by lagrange77 »

achenet wrote: post #343
illuminati1911 wrote: post #319

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 Fortun…

> The global economy and free market will always make sure that the talented people will receive higher compensation. Any proof of that statement? Or are you one of those people who believes in the invisible hand of providence the way religious people believe in God? Hey, remember back in the good old days of cotton plantations, when the African slaves were well compensated for their extreme talent in picking cotton…

Right. Many people somehow believe in a magical justice-ensuring instance in the world, even though, they are proved wrong every single day.

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

#353

Post by tazjin »

88913527 wrote: post #17

You have to wonder what proportion of GDP is money sloshing around like this but not providing any real value. The consultants got their paychecks and spent their money in the real economy, but there seems to be a great deal of waste in the B2B space.

Read this related Twitter thread recently: https://twitter.com/crim_thought/status/1549554660184231936

It's about comparing global economies in terms of actual, physical production output instead of GDP numbers that include nonsense like the big "service" companies. Results are unsurprising.

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

#354

Post by happymellon »

NonNefarious wrote: post #322
_tik_ wrote: post #285

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Andersen Consulting/Accenture is my first job. Accenture directly sends me to the client after finishing my orientation program and 2-3 days of training. On my first day arrived at the client side for some initial discussion. I saw everyone standing with anxious faces and suddenly everyone spontaneously laughing. On lunch time, the client told me this was their first time engaging a big consultant firm and they did n…

"Orientation program?" Did they not send you to CAPS in St. Charles?

When I joined Accenture, also as my first IT job out of college, we did training in a hotel room just of i35 in Austin.

I had never touched Java before, we did C at college, and became a Java developer after 3 days holed up with 10 other people doing coding challenges on a laptop.

I didn't get to go to any of the training centers until I'd been there for a year.

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

#355

Post by yosito »

Aperocky wrote: post #311
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.

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

Just a few weeks ago, I showed up at a Hertz location to pick up a car rental I had already paid for. They refused to give me the car saying that they didn't have some kind of required booking number in their system and that I would have to pay a second time to get the car. I showed them the withdrawal from my bank account, and the email receipt that Hertz had sent me saying that I had paid. They had all of my information in their system and the car was ready to go, they just insisted that I needed to pay again because their system did not have some number that they required. I spent 3 hour on hold with their customer support phone number, and they were unable to help. I eventually told them to go f themselves, disputed the charge on my credit card, and rented a car from the booth next to them at the airport. Hertz is a completely incompetent company, and that's before getting into the horror stories of returned rentals that they've reported as stolen, landing people in jail for the crime of renting a car from Hertz and returning it on time. I will never do business with Hertz (or Thrifty, which is also Hertz) again.

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

#356

Post by nibbleshifter »

malux85 wrote: post #84
Nextgrid wrote: post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Is there good money to be made though? If idiots are happy to pay more for shit than they do for quality work I'll happily deliver them shit.

Did you read the title? When I was at a consulting firm in London that I wont name, I was charging them 700GBP a day, and they were charging the end client 1500GBP a day (I saw this on an internal presentation slide I was not supposed to see)

When I was doing consulting in the UK, there were often layers of white label.

Client hires company A, who bill 2.5kGBP.

Company A outsources to Company B at ~1.5kGBP.

Company B outsources to Company C for 700GBP.

Consultant at Company C makes buggery fuck all, and has to unravel the mess of Chinese whispers/obfuscation to work out what the job actually is and who they are meant to be pretending to be that day, whose report template was being used, etc.

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

#357

Post by gnz11 »

mgbmtl wrote: post #82
osrec wrote: post #23

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Why anyone would pick that over a bunch of very mature open source offerings (with much larger developer communities) is beyond me.

Just curious, which OSS CMS would you recommend for that kind of site? I work with Drupal and WordPress, but would not recommend them for user data or transactional data (although in my case, we bridge Drupal/WordPress with CiviCRM, and that works relatively well).

Wagtail, you get a great CMS on top of a powerful framework (Django). Best part of Wagtail is that it doesn’t get in the way of Django so you can drop it into any Django project with ease.

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

#358

Post by juanpicardo »

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…

I've been doing AEM projects for a decade. You are not wrong.

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

#359

Post by nickjj »

BurningFrog wrote: post #186
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…

Say what you will about the Jira process, there is no climbing involved...

If you use Basecamp you can climb with hill charts: https://basecamp.com/features/hill-charts

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

#360

Post by juanpicardo »

DaiPlusPlus wrote: post #117
wmeredith wrote: post #80

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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

Educate me: What does AEM do that a tweaked WordPress or Drupal (or even SharePoint Site Template) doesn't?

it's suited mostly for large multinationals. I havent used drupal or wordpress at that scale, but if you have website that you need to rollout to >30 countries in many languages AEM might be for you.

just an example of the kind of companies that use it. apple, intel,etc .e.g https://jobs.apple.com/en-in/details/200207733/aem-engineer

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