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Deloitte to refund the Australian government after using AI in $440k report

theguardian.com

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Re: Deloitte to refund the Australian government after using AI in $440k report

#101

Post by Intermernet »

jacquesm wrote: post #90
Intermernet wrote: post #61

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The thing is, the original problem is one that "the free market" would say should fail. That company, without the expertise required to do the job, should fail. Having consultants do anything in this situation is antithetical to the ideal of a company. The company should fail, OR, the consultants should advise that the company should either fail or gain the expertise to no longer require consultants. Obviously this i…

There are so many different kinds of expertise, you can't have everything in house. The problem is that now you are going to have to hire someone for something that you are not qualified to do yourself, which almost automatically implies that you are not qualified to make that hire either. So everybody plays it safe and they hire the 'big names' because those have social proof, no matter how crap the actual interacti…

Yes, that's a more detailed way of saying what I mean, but without the snark against "the free market". The value provided by the big 4 is based on a universal acceptance of "play it safe, cover your ass" instead of "we provide quality advice". The big 4 have realised this, as near, captive market, and lowered their output accordingly.

Re: Deloitte to refund the Australian government after using AI in $440k report

#102

Post by [deleted] »

DrScientist wrote: post #59

While we are on the topic of listing problems with consultants/outsourcing - another potential problem is the A team/ B team switch. During initial engagement you are often talking to somebody who appears to actually know their stuff - you hire them and find that this knowledgable person has moved on to the next big sales, and you've got the B or C team.

[deleted]

Re: Deloitte to refund the Australian government after using AI in $440k report

#103

Post by TrackerFF »

oytis wrote: post #3

Can someone explain to me how and why consulting works? If a man had no real skills except giving advice left and right, he would be considered a loser. Now make it a company, and corporations and governments queue up for their advice. Wouldn't your own employees be in a better position to give you advice than people who know nothing of your business and who's only skills are googling and making presentations?

Say you're some business, government agency, or whatever. You mainly focus on one or few core things (the product, or service you're providing).

Suddenly you face change, maybe the markets are changing, or tech has come a long way - but in any case, it is in something which is either outside your area of expertise, or you don't have the resources to do it yourself.

So instead of hiring N people to do that one thing, you pay external people to do it for you. This is especially attractive in agencies where you have budgets to consider, can't just hire workers on a whim, and where firing workers can be equally difficult.

That's where consulting firms come in. Most big consulting firms tend to be huge, and have expert networks all over the world - so there's a decent likelihood they'll have someone that have knowledge in the problem you're looking to get solved. And they hire smart enough people that will toil away.

In a good scenario the consultants will have interviewed you, taken a deep dive look into your organization, analyzed the data, and either answered out your problem, or laid out exactly what you need to solve that problem. Usually on the strategy side.

For the implementation itself, you can either go to step 1 and hire people to do it, or hire some other consulting agency to actually do the implementation work.

That's at least the ideal situation. Sometimes consultants are just hired to rubber stamp controversial leadership decisions, and to back up things that leadership can't get internal backing for.

Re: Deloitte to refund the Australian government after using AI in $440k report

#104

Post by anonzzzies »

DrScientist wrote: post #59

While we are on the topic of listing problems with consultants/outsourcing - another potential problem is the A team/ B team switch. During initial engagement you are often talking to somebody who appears to actually know their stuff - you hire them and find that this knowledgable person has moved on to the next big sales, and you've got the B or C team.

Especially when the teams are bigger, you have some A person who works with 100 teams who pops in when you are really fed up to calm you and who is 'definitely on top of your project' and the rest are all juniors (and now less juniors with AI). One of my clients paid 500k for a project and asked us to vet the quality; they believed they were paying 15 people for the past months; when we went on zoom to talk to the team, after many camera/connection issues, we got the 15 people. So we asked to interview them all. Only one of them knew technical details about the project, the rest did not. The one guy that does know is the tech lead my client originally hired and seems he works part time on the project, or at least reads the tasks. Looking at the vast amounts of (bad) code, our suspicion is that there are 5 or so people using codex/claude code to paste in the tasks, wait for the code, go to some 'fake QA process' and then commit and deploy. This happened before AI definitely, but probably then it would be actually 15 people hammering code, but juniors instead of the seniors you are paying for.

Re: Deloitte to refund the Australian government after using AI in $440k report

#105

Post by hopelite »

Gigachad wrote: post #71
DrScientist wrote: post #62

Earlier quoted context omitted.

To balance that with a positive comment - one of the reasons for going with a consultant/outsourcing is if you have a big one/off type project that you can't resource internally with perms. So the choice is trying to hire a bunch of individual contractors and forge them into a team, or hire a pre-built team for a period of time [1] [1] Sometimes it's sold as a re-built team - but in reality it might be hired in exact…

I just don’t see how this happens for government work though. Surely they have enough year round work to hire people in house for it.

Usually it’s not the amount of work, it’s whether that work is necessary at all and a question of quality because the interests are largely aligned when they should be in tension and some opposition. Bad things happen when the interests of all parties are in one direction, usually due to a lack of real consequences.

In government you have to remember that it’s people playing with other people’s money, thinking all along that it’s their money, i.e., a sense of entitlement. So you end up with many of the same kinds and types of deep problems that you see in things like investment frauds, trust fund babies, spoiled children, and drug addicts. It’s probably not a coincidence that those often heavily overlap, including among bureaucrats and people dependent of government money.

We are talking about a militating of resources and from that comes a whole cascading effect, e.g., the children of someone who has actually produced something well through the effective and productive allocation of resources, resource maxing, so to say; will produce far better progeny than someone whose efforts have never led to anything productive as a bureaucrat that simply brushes one billion dollar failure after another under the rug while coping with ever more vociferously proclamations of how important and good of a job he does.

A good case in point is how America is $38 trillion in realized national debt, all while the “boomer generation” is at the same time declaring how wonderful things are, regardless of the political party. Those two things cannot be reconciled and will not perdure.

Re: Deloitte to refund the Australian government after using AI in $440k report

#106

Post by JCM9 »

CEOs keep taking (mostly misguided) about how GenAI will replace their people. The thing they miss, and this highlights, is that customers will also expect to pay far less for GenAI produced workloads, which likely more than eliminates any cost savings.

Congrats clueless CEO… you’re now selling a worse product at lower margins. Success!

Re: Deloitte to refund the Australian government after using AI in $440k report

#107

Post by dmd »

thelastgallon wrote: post #97
rhetocj23 wrote: post #85

Earlier quoted context omitted.

That’s exactly how it works.

I've learnt this truth recently with most professions. Consultations with attorney based on rave reviews, after signing up, get assigned a random attorney from the firm. One attorney instantly sold my case to another attorney! Just started talking to chiropractor (i know! same as astrology), same trick! I haven't seen this yet in doctors offices. I see a doctor at an office specialized in an area (say gastrointestina…

Chiropractor is NOT the same as astrology. Astrology isn’t noted for causing permanent spinal cord damage and quadriplegia.

Re: Deloitte to refund the Australian government after using AI in $440k report

#108

Post by HelloUsername »

emmelaich wrote: post #70

Not unrelated, but the Albanese govt spending way too much on consultants. https://www.theguardian.com/australia-news/2025/oct/06/deloi... https://www.smh.com.au/politics/federal/labor-vowed-to-crack...

> https://www.theguardian.com/australia-news/2025/oct/06/deloi...

Why did you include the same article that you're posting on?

Re: Deloitte to refund the Australian government after using AI in $440k report

#109

Post by moron4hire »

Intermernet wrote: post #61
protocolture wrote: post #57

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You would be surprised how many companies dont have the expertise in house. And of that set, you would be surprised how many make financial and technical decisions based on no expertise and get themselves into all sorts of trouble. You may also be surprised how many companies have 1 guy in house who pretends to be an expert and does his damned best to prevent people getting hired who might out them. Good consultants…

The thing is, the original problem is one that "the free market" would say should fail. That company, without the expertise required to do the job, should fail. Having consultants do anything in this situation is antithetical to the ideal of a company. The company should fail, OR, the consultants should advise that the company should either fail or gain the expertise to no longer require consultants. Obviously this i…

And what about companies that purchase materials necessary to their business from 3rd party vendors? Should all companies that aren't 100% vertically integrated die, or just the ones purchasing services?

Re: Deloitte to refund the Australian government after using AI in $440k report

#110

Post by harperlee »

jacquesm wrote: post #88
DrScientist wrote: post #59

While we are on the topic of listing problems with consultants/outsourcing - another potential problem is the A team/ B team switch. During initial engagement you are often talking to somebody who appears to actually know their stuff - you hire them and find that this knowledgable person has moved on to the next big sales, and you've got the B or C team.

That's the whole game. Meet the partner, get the juniors, pay for the partner. And if you're really unlucky you can spend your time educating the juniors.

Less cynically: there is only one partner; the team, if it works, manages to leverage the partner to ~5x - 10x.

And no, you don’t pay partner rates. The client generally knows that to do commercial pressure you need to get info about team size, put it in the contract, and then negotiate on blended rate so it is close to what the market pays for the junior.

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