My life in Accenture before startups • Hacker News Board

Re: My life in Accenture before startups

#111

Post by lurker17 » Fri, Jun 10, 2011, 1:35 AM UTC

notirk wrote: post #100

sfard wrote: post #98

Seriously, since when is Accenture considered Prestigious? It's not even a top consulting shop. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/McKinsey_%26_Company#Competitor...

Big 3 of consulting: McKinsey, BCG, Bain - These are all strategy only. Accenture was the consulting arm of Arther Anderson which was one of the Big 5 of accounting (Enron brought them down.) Accenture is known for implementation/technology/strategy. Along with Deliotte, CapGemini, Booz, etc. These firms differentiate themselves with implementation from the Big 3 that are strategy only.

Accenture is more known for bungling giant contracts and sucking money out of nearly-bankrupt organizations.

Re: My life in Accenture before startups

#112

Post by tsotha » Fri, Jun 10, 2011, 3:48 AM UTC

gaius wrote: post #54

drtse4 wrote: post #47

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The problem here is that considering how these consulting companies are structured, how they work and their size, the capability to hire good developers imho is not even there. Also, are companies like Accenture chosen by their clients for the incredible quality of their work? I'm also from Italy, so i could have observed something peculiar to this market, but the clients of those big consulting corps (usually from t…

Client pay for predictably mediocre. It's a scale: pay $X and get Y% probability of the project being done by D date. Of course they don't even get that; in practice, Accenture are as unpredictable as any large-scale software development effort. So rather than mediocre yet safe, you get mediocre, and late, and over budget. LOLZ on you! Or on your poor shareholders/taxpayers more like.

When I dealt with Accenture (back when they were Anderson Consulting), they were quite predictable - always late, always over budget, and always producing an unmaintainable mess.

The developers were good or bad in about the same percentages as other companies, but the management structure was designed to suck money out of the client. Work product was secondary (or, whatever) and it showed.

Re: My life in Accenture before startups

#113

Post by jlees » Fri, Jun 10, 2011, 4:14 AM UTC

I'm glad you wrote this, Daniel! I applied to Accenture three times, in my final year of undergrad, a year after graduating and then again when I was doing my Master's. I only got to the final stage of interviews once, and apparently cocked it up simply because I didn't exhibit my listening skills (despite, as I was coached, being the whiteboard monkey in the group exercise).

I was devastated - I had felt challenged by the recruitment process and was excited at the prospect of working there. Somehow now I feel a little better about taking a different path in life. :)

Re: My life in Accenture before startups

#114

Post by cubicle67 » Fri, Jun 10, 2011, 5:09 AM UTC

mason55 wrote: post #76

cubicle67 wrote: post #40

I spent a number of years working as an employee of one of the big IT outsourcers on a Australian government department (better not say which one) contract. During this time I was required to assist a team from Accenture who had won a contract to write some software that needed to be integrated with a number of systems. Accenture had "all their best people" on the job. This meant almost an entire floor of staff; mana…

> Accenture had "all their best people" on the job. This meant almost an entire floor of staff; managers, project managers, BAs, god knows what else. Oh, they also had two young devs, you know, to actually do the work. As a dev/architect in Professional Services (not at a big 5 consulting firm), this is way off the mark. PMs and BAs do a ton of work that I either would not want to do or am not good at and while the e…

I tend to write in a hyperbolic way to accentuate the point I'm trying to make. Obviously the BAs et al do a lot of work, but I was trying to contrast the number of non-developers to developers (yes, there were only 2).

I should note that my opinion of BAs is not very high, based solely on the dozen or so I've had to work with. The job sounds worthwhile, and I'm sure there's excellent BAs out there, but the company I used to work for didn't employ any of them (or perhaps the culture was such that the good ones left)

Re: My life in Accenture before startups

#115

Post by [deleted] » Fri, Jun 10, 2011, 6:48 AM UTC

dabent wrote: post #61

edw519 wrote: post #27

My typical day working for a Big 5 firm: 7:00 - drive to client in Redlands 8:00 - arrive in Redlands 8:42 - client arrives for 8:00 meeting 8:51 - client leaves for emergency 8:52 - review project with programmer - still 18 months behind 9:15 - daily email to 6 bosses about dire status 9:38 - take call from boss #4 - debate "strategic direction" 10:20 - coffee, snack, & bitch session with lead programmer 10:45 - dri…

10:45 - drive to client in Century City 12:20 - arrive in Century City, everyone at lunch already From what little I know of LA, that drive time sounds pretty short.

[deleted]

Re: My life in Accenture before startups

#116

Post by vetler » Fri, Jun 10, 2011, 6:48 AM UTC

Aramgutang wrote: post #109

edw519 wrote: post #27

My typical day working for a Big 5 firm: 7:00 - drive to client in Redlands 8:00 - arrive in Redlands 8:42 - client arrives for 8:00 meeting 8:51 - client leaves for emergency 8:52 - review project with programmer - still 18 months behind 9:15 - daily email to 6 bosses about dire status 9:38 - take call from boss #4 - debate "strategic direction" 10:20 - coffee, snack, & bitch session with lead programmer 10:45 - dri…

10:00 - go to daily status meeting 10:12 - everyone else arrives at daily status meeting 2:00 - go to Special Planning Session for Project #127 2:12 - others arrive at Special Planning Session for Project #127 4:00 - go to daily stand-up meeting for project status 4:08 - others arrive at daily stand-up meeting for project status If you know everyone else is going to be reliably late to a meeting, why show up on time…

I considered commenting on how familiar this sounds.

Personally, I can't help showing up on time. It just comes naturally to me. It used to irritate me that other people don't show up on time, but I'm trying to get used to it.

If everyone could just show up on time for meetings, we would probably be done earlier and have time to get real work done.

Oh well.

Re: My life in Accenture before startups

#117

Post by blueplastic » Fri, Jun 10, 2011, 9:43 AM UTC

I work for Accenture R&D in San Jose, CA. Everything I've read here is very different than my typical work day. We're hiring analysts (entry level) and consultants (experienced hires) to work in our research lab. Both on the Research (typically PhD) and Development (typically BA/MA) sides. Click on my username and you'll find my email if you'd like to apply.

The people I work with are doing things like studying NoSQL databases (Cassandra, Riak, HBASE), MapReduce (Hadoop, Cloud MapReduce), cryptography, biometrics, language/sentiment analysis, data visualizations, cloud computing (Amazon, Rackspace, VMWare) etc. We're not like the typical consulting arm of Accenture. We're also not like a typical theory focused research lab.

We're a fun bunch. Recent company sponsored trips have included sailing the bay, indoor skydiving at iFly, snowboarding in Tahoe, white water rafting, wine tasting, hiking, a vegas trip and behind the scenes tour of the SF Giants stadium. We're also known to throw some pretty wicked happy hours.

Re: My life in Accenture before startups

#118

Post by blueplastic » Fri, Jun 10, 2011, 9:44 AM UTC

blueplastic wrote: post #117

I work for Accenture R&D in San Jose, CA. Everything I've read here is very different than my typical work day. We're hiring analysts (entry level) and consultants (experienced hires) to work in our research lab. Both on the Research (typically PhD) and Development (typically BA/MA) sides. Click on my username and you'll find my email if you'd like to apply. The people I work with are doing things like studying NoSQL…

Oh, here's our group's website: accenture.com/techlabs

Re: My life in Accenture before startups

#119

Post by dools » Fri, Jun 10, 2011, 1:14 PM UTC

jbrechtel wrote: post #106

fbnt wrote: post #36

I left Accenture (Italy) this january, after 3 years, and just like you I was hired right after graduation thanks to my 'mad' java skills, after about 1 year I wasn't writing much code anymore and SQL, Word & Excel became my only daily companions. Negatives/things I didn't like during my experience in Accenture : - Working 10-14 hours a day (^). If you were to leave at 6pm your supervisor would joke about it ("hey, d…

Just for anyone wondering, not all consultancies operate this way. I've been at ThoughtWorks for 2 years now and it's nothing like this. It's quite literally the opposite on every negative point mentioned above.

As opposed to being metaphorically the opposite of every negative point above?

Re: My life in Accenture before startups

#120

Post by astrofinch » Sat, Jun 11, 2011, 12:38 AM UTC

As a college student, I've been thinking about working as a consultant so I can survey a variety of different businesses in a variety of industries and see how they operate. Seems like it might be a good preparation for being an entrepreneur. (See this comment of mine for further justification: http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2635564.)

Does this sound like a good plan? What would the best consulting firm to work for be? Ideally I'd like to see as wide a variety of businesses as possible, and ideally they'd be well run businesses I could steal ideas from. But even, say, seeing a bunch of poorly run businesses seems like it could be really valuable.