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

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

#411

Post by ctrager » Sun, Jul 24, 2022, 12:29 PM UTC

ryloric wrote: post #404

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…

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

I don't know. I speculate: So, like, the consulting company has to sell... something. They develop a... what was it called...a system development life cycle methodology? Maybe partly sincere, maybe partly bullshit, I dunno. I remember it visually as a shelf of several manuals. I imagine top AA partners selling to the top execs. Then everybody down the hierarchy doing what they've been told to do, being, not evil, but just respectful of the hierarchy. Also, many of those AA people only knowing the AA way, not having the experience, the confidence to be sure that the AA way was insane. Also, the way AA worked then "Up or Out", you are always competing with your peers. Not good for your career to rock the boat, to attack the methodology that the top partners had sold UAL.

And I don't think there was much that we as UAL employees could do. The fact that upper UAL management brought in AA to lead the project, to me, that means they were already dismissive of their in-house people and seduced by the outside people. Later in my career I experienced both sides of this a few times.

I only worked on the project 14 months. During that time the top AA partner in charge quit AA. Then the replacement quit AA, and maybe another. Maybe even they knew. I think a lot of people knew it was insane, but not able to change things as individuals.

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

#412

Post by ctrager » Sun, Jul 24, 2022, 12:42 PM UTC

listenallyall wrote: post #406

ctrager wrote: post #380

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 softwar…

I dunno. I myself was pretty clueless about PCs at that time. I owned a Kaypro from the early 1980s that ran CP/M, but I never touched a PC running Windows (or even just DOS) until 1994. They weren't part of the centralized IT departments I worked in. They WERE part of a sorta grass roots revolt by the user departments, setting up their own Lotus spreadsheets, whatever, as a way of bypassing the slow bureaucratic centralized IT departments.

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

#413

Post by illuminati1911 » Sun, Jul 24, 2022, 2:06 PM UTC

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…

” 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?”

It’s inherent fact of the reality we live in. People like money and higher compensation.

”Hey, remember back in the good old days of cotton plantations, when the African sl…”

Slavery is opposite of free market. I don’t know why you bring up such an bad example.

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

#414

Post by bsenftner » Sun, Jul 24, 2022, 5:44 PM UTC

al_mandi wrote: post #396

achenet wrote: post #343

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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…

> the way religious people believe in God? Except that there are concrete proofs of God.

Love to see such a magical document.

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

#415

Post by mbrodersen » Mon, Jul 25, 2022, 1:29 AM UTC

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.

That makes me think that formally proving the code correct using a proof assistant would actually be faster than the process you describe.

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

#416

Post by [deleted] » Mon, Jul 25, 2022, 1:58 AM UTC

Nextgrid wrote: post #348

sytelus wrote: post #320

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

However, Hertz did end up spending $32M, so it turns out they can offer compensation like the top 20% if they wanted to.

[deleted]

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

#417

Post by InefficientRed » Mon, Jul 25, 2022, 2:51 AM UTC

Pilottwave wrote: post #334

InefficientRed wrote: post #271

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

I have seen a company spin up and after 2 years spin out a seperate innovation unit, and when it was a proper seperate entity outsource their core IT to the unit... Which was then branded a big success! It was liberating to see such systemic incompetence; The people were all highly educated but as a group just can't seem to organize effectively.

This Sounds like financial engineering. It is possible the people involved were incompetent, either individually or as a group. But this sounds like an incentive problem. Competence, misdirected.

> Branded as a success

I fear you aren't cyncical enough.

Was it a filure? Did the company's balance sheet improve? Did the company's stock price increase? Did the spinout attract a load of investment for its (pre-destined) success and turn that into a rich revenue stream?

Markets -- for both debt and equity -- are mostly idiotic machines on short timeframes. Your ability to generate free cash flow puts a floor on your price. Others' imagination and available liquidity are the only ceilings.

Additionally, these types of spin outs can behave like generational wealth. They may be incompetent idiots, but who cares? Daddy's money is more than you can raise and mommy's rolodex is richer than you could possibly imagine.

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

#418

Post by Ken_At_EM » Mon, Jul 25, 2022, 3:02 AM UTC

AtlasBarfed wrote: post #390

Ken_At_EM wrote: post #388

Earlier quoted context omitted.

What stops someone specifically from disrupting the Auto Rental industry?

1) real estate by the airports is probably #1 2) airport counter real estate or the real estate at the "car rental satellite facility" is probably hard to get 3) fleet sale discounting with the car companies But #1 is probably the main one. Car rentals are actually decent in competition, although there may have been a merger flurry at some point. Yup, Enterprise, Avis, and Hertz own them all. It would probably take s…

Right, but it doesn’t seem like it’s not a free market, there doesn’t sound like there’s legislation protecting these companies. Unlike what EVs have has to go up against with dealerships.

Extremely poor customer experience across the board sounds ripe for disruption. Companies just don’t understand how vulnerable this makes them. There’s absolutely no loyalty or connection built with a bad customer experience.

A few years from now there will be a startup that shows us a better way and we’ll have a hard time understanding why we put up with crappy customer experience and mediocrity for so long.

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

#419

Post by imhoguy » Mon, Jul 25, 2022, 10:13 AM UTC

pugets wrote: post #302

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.

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.

My friend also wasn't enthusiastic about AEM at his workplace, he wanted just "ordinary" Java. But Java is just a tool and one often lands in some legacy or overgrown enterprise solution.

I advised him to do AEM certifications. He did and then contract recruiters has started to flood him. He collects tons of cash as independent AEM consultant now. And with Java, he does "fulfilling" Java stuff on the side.

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

#420

Post by eadmund » Mon, Jul 25, 2022, 10:33 PM UTC

lossolo wrote: post #401

eadmund wrote: post #375

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

You’re completely right, and I apparently cannot use units(1) to save my life. I have no idea how I screwed that one up so badly. I was more wrong than the original poster.