The big 3 get hired to protect managers. Hire a smaller consulting firm and the project goes sideways you both get fired. Hire a big firm and it goes sideways they get fired - until the next project.
Pentagon to terminate $5.1B in IT contracts with Accenture, Deloitte
161–170 of 684 posts
Re: Pentagon to terminate $5.1B in IT contracts with Accenture, Deloitte
#162Now the UK should swiftly follow suit in sacking these cowboys. The taxpayer is being charged extortionate rates in some cases for fresh graduates who know effectively nothing at all about what they talk about. At the same time, we should increase salary banding for technical roles to the market rate. We will get the experience we need for much, much less.
Salary banding doesn’t attract the talent you need. Maybe, good enough? E.g. Who would contribute to open source, speak at conferences, write blog articles, go above and beyond to outwardly contribute, only to be grouped with others to make the same? Terrible deal.
TIL people contribute to Open Source for money.
Just FYI: everyone who contributes to OSS makes the same!
Re: Pentagon to terminate $5.1B in IT contracts with Accenture, Deloitte
#163Earlier quoted context omitted.
Perhaps, but the profit motivation is completely different. One's there to serve and the other to bill hours.
Based on my personal experience and that of many others I know, that's about as wrong as one can get. A great many government workers are there to collect a paycheck and go home (just like many other people working for many other employers). Their commitment to 'the mission' hovers near zero. Just ask them. Where do people get these crazy ideas about government employees? There are some wonderful people in public ser…
Personally, I get this from my interactions with the reviewers at the FDA. Absolutely buried in work, always make the best effort to improve your submission, etc.
Re: Pentagon to terminate $5.1B in IT contracts with Accenture, Deloitte
#164On the face of it cutting huge IT govt contracts sounds like a good choice to reduce waste, but with this administration I'm expecting any savings to be funneled to Grok/xAI/Elon.
>> The pacts "represent non-essential spending on third party consultants" for services Pentagon employees can perform The irony is that they're cutting external solution providers to do more in-house. ... which means more work in-house. ... done by the same teams they just cut the size of. Without looking at government pay bands for specialty talent, I think the Pentagon is going to have a hard time doing this work…
Yeah that’s going to be the problem. The pay bands are so low they would be lucky to get people with degrees at all. Definitely not talent
Re: Pentagon to terminate $5.1B in IT contracts with Accenture, Deloitte
#165Kinda amusing that the general sentiment so far, in a forum filled with technology expertise, is that there is certainly waste in these budgets. But, when discussing the overall trend of cutting programs in other fields where the majority doesn't have that expertise, the conclusion is the opposite.
It is called the Gell-Mann Amnesia Effect. Coined by author Michael Crichton: “Briefly stated, the Gell-Mann Amnesia effect is as follows. You open the newspaper to an article on some subject you know well. In Murray's case, physics. In mine, show business. You read the article and see the journalist has absolutely no understanding of either the facts or the issues. Often, the article is so wrong it actually presents…
I read the news to judge what the propagandist want me to know, not to actually learn things.
I find skimming NYT’s and FOX’s headlines are perfectly satisfactory. If anything peaks my interest I do independent analysis, putting weight on primary sources. I often try to listen in on experts discussing the matter among themselves.
Re: Pentagon to terminate $5.1B in IT contracts with Accenture, Deloitte
#166Earlier quoted context omitted.
Perhaps, but the profit motivation is completely different. One's there to serve and the other to bill hours.
Both are there to collect a check. One can get fired for doing nothing and the other cant.
I'd counter that the cost to the American taxpayer is far less when you avoid the consultant upcharge, all else being equal.
Re: Pentagon to terminate $5.1B in IT contracts with Accenture, Deloitte
#167Earlier quoted context omitted.
Salary banding doesn’t attract the talent you need. Maybe, good enough? E.g. Who would contribute to open source, speak at conferences, write blog articles, go above and beyond to outwardly contribute, only to be grouped with others to make the same? Terrible deal.
TIL people contribute to Open Source for money. Just FYI: everyone who contributes to OSS makes the same!
tons of people are paid to contribute to oss..
Re: Pentagon to terminate $5.1B in IT contracts with Accenture, Deloitte
#168On the face of it cutting huge IT govt contracts sounds like a good choice to reduce waste, but with this administration I'm expecting any savings to be funneled to Grok/xAI/Elon.
At least that's cutting out the middleman -many big consulting firms are whitelabelling AI nonsense already.
Re: Pentagon to terminate $5.1B in IT contracts with Accenture, Deloitte
#169Now the UK should swiftly follow suit in sacking these cowboys. The taxpayer is being charged extortionate rates in some cases for fresh graduates who know effectively nothing at all about what they talk about. At the same time, we should increase salary banding for technical roles to the market rate. We will get the experience we need for much, much less.
I agree. The government could be made hugely more efficient through the use of technology. However, the civil service simply doesn't pay enough to attract the talent it needs. Therefore, we are left with little option but to pay consultants more to deliver these contracts. The total cost to the tax payer is higher; it doesn't make sense! It is reductive to say that we just need to pay more, however. The civil service…
> It is reductive to say that we just need to pay more, however. The civil service also needs better and more effective management. Consultants are used as both liability shields and to force through change, both of which are an abdication of management's responsibility.
Yes. The whole atmosphere is dysfunctional, because politicians don't trust the civil service. It's very attractive, and very neoliberal, to say that a state function is simply a service that can be contracted out. But not everything that matters can be specified in contracts! You eventually have to rely on staff judgement and common sense, including a shared sense of mission. That was how TfL breakup eventually didn't happen: people tried to turn the operating manuals into millions of lines of contracts, but it became unworkably complicated.
PFI was the worst aspect of this. Take the one thing government can unambiguously do cheaper than the private sector - borrow money - and contract that out with a value extraction layer on top of it.
Re: Pentagon to terminate $5.1B in IT contracts with Accenture, Deloitte
#170Kinda amusing that the general sentiment so far, in a forum filled with technology expertise, is that there is certainly waste in these budgets. But, when discussing the overall trend of cutting programs in other fields where the majority doesn't have that expertise, the conclusion is the opposite.
Seems pretty consistent to me. People were also upset when IT employees got fired.
The general rule that employees good, contractors bad still holds. Even though people seem obsessed with the belief that firing public employees and replacing them with private contractors will make the government more “efficient”.