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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)

#401

Post by lossolo »

eadmund wrote: post #375
eternalban wrote: post #240

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>> 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 ..)

> An oil major probably makes $20MM in profit every few minutes or at most in an hour. ExxonMobil made $23 billion in profit in 2021; that works out to just over three days and three hours to get to $20 million. Shell made $20.6 billion in profit in 2021; it would take them even longer. The other majors made even less. A project which wastes over three days of profits is hugely expensive.

23 billion / 365 = ~63 mil so it's 1/3 of a day, basically 8 hours of profit, not 3 days.

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

#402

Post by jb_s »

ctrager wrote: post #380
listenallyall wrote: post #314

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

If I had just written the program directly, I could have TYPED, and I could have used the backspace and delete keys to erase instead of an ACTUAL eraser, and I could have used cut and paste instead of ACTUAL scissors and paste. Plus, I could have used the compile, test, debug cycle to verify that what I was writing actually worked. My specs were the same complexity as the code: Let's pretend, for example, there were…

nice.. it's just "low code" :-)

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

#403

Post by NonNefarious »

happymellon wrote: post #354
NonNefarious wrote: post #322

Earlier quoted context omitted.

"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.

Ah. Well, believe it or not, Andersen's six-week programming boot camp in St. Charles was still in COBOL... in the '90s. That was mainly because their biggest customers were government and industry firms running huge legacy systems. Think Raytheon, McDonnell-Douglass, Hershey.

Eventually they did switch to C. I wonder what the curriculum is today.

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

#404

Post by ryloric »

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…

How can the people who came up with this and put this system in place not know how insane this sounds?

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

#405

Post by nazka »

listenallyall wrote: post #316
nazka wrote: post #201

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

I was just sharing the story.

Now 2 weeks for a simple change in a if. Some changes can take months and the software is not just a few line of code so if you do the math you may start to have rust on your hardware even before the v1.0 is out. Also nobody is going to read this type of “doc” but another schema spec coder if that’s the name.

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

#406

Post by listenallyall »

ctrager wrote: post #380
listenallyall wrote: post #314

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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?

If I had just written the program directly, I could have TYPED, and I could have used the backspace and delete keys to erase instead of an ACTUAL eraser, and I could have used cut and paste instead of ACTUAL scissors and paste. Plus, I could have used the compile, test, debug cycle to verify that what I was writing actually worked. My specs were the same complexity as the code: Let's pretend, for example, there were…

Cutting and pasting with scissors and actual paste sounds pretty awful. But what I was hoping to get more insight about, if the task was to draw tens of thousands of pages of flowcharts (not text), would a 1980's PC (maybe 16mb RAM, 5.25" floppies, no GUI) be more efficient than a pen and paper? Even on a modern PC, I can often draw a flowchart quite a bit faster than I can create it in Lucidcharts or similar software.

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

#407

Post by happymellon »

NonNefarious wrote: post #403
happymellon wrote: post #354

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Ah. Well, believe it or not, Andersen's six-week programming boot camp in St. Charles was still in COBOL... in the '90s. That was mainly because their biggest customers were government and industry firms running huge legacy systems. Think Raytheon, McDonnell-Douglass, Hershey. Eventually they did switch to C. I wonder what the curriculum is today.

This was 2003, and was for a job with the State. I was absolutely atrocious as I had no idea what I was doing and really got no support to figure out how to code in the real world. Knowing now what I know now, that codebase could only have been created by sticking new grad after new grad on it without any peer reviews. The amount of nested if statements made it impossible to follow.

I don't know why anyone would hire these consulting firms other than plausible deniability of blame.

I would imagine that most large corporations and government code is still Java, only specialist systems are still COBOL.

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

#408

Post by NonNefarious »

happymellon wrote: post #407
NonNefarious wrote: post #403

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Ah. Well, believe it or not, Andersen's six-week programming boot camp in St. Charles was still in COBOL... in the '90s. That was mainly because their biggest customers were government and industry firms running huge legacy systems. Think Raytheon, McDonnell-Douglass, Hershey. Eventually they did switch to C. I wonder what the curriculum is today.

This was 2003, and was for a job with the State. I was absolutely atrocious as I had no idea what I was doing and really got no support to figure out how to code in the real world. Knowing now what I know now, that codebase could only have been created by sticking new grad after new grad on it without any peer reviews. The amount of nested if statements made it impossible to follow. I don't know why anyone would hire…

"The amount of nested if statements made it impossible to follow"

I'm floored that you mentioned this. One memory I often cite of my early days there was walking past a colleague's desk and seeing a diagonal line of text from the upper-left corner of her monitor to the lower-right. Closer inspection revealed that she was processing a 30-character part number with as many nested IF statements, instead of iterating through it.

Even as a 21-year-old I was appalled that this was being delivered to clients.

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

#409

Post by happymellon »

NonNefarious wrote: post #408
happymellon wrote: post #407

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This was 2003, and was for a job with the State. I was absolutely atrocious as I had no idea what I was doing and really got no support to figure out how to code in the real world. Knowing now what I know now, that codebase could only have been created by sticking new grad after new grad on it without any peer reviews. The amount of nested if statements made it impossible to follow. I don't know why anyone would hire…

"The amount of nested if statements made it impossible to follow" I'm floored that you mentioned this. One memory I often cite of my early days there was walking past a colleague's desk and seeing a diagonal line of text from the upper-left corner of her monitor to the lower-right. Closer inspection revealed that she was processing a 30-character part number with as many nested IF statements, instead of iterating thr…

It was awful, but not being exposed to Java, or professional development before I assumed it was how it was meant to be.

I still have to use Java from time to time, and I dislike the amount of "Spring magic" that colleagues try to use with it. No wonder the kids end up writing junk, they are used to never understanding what's going on anyway.

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