Yeah they'll move it in-house... after they just fired all the new hires from this year. I'm sure they'll be able to find a bunch of experienced devs with clearances who want to work near DC for 50k/yr.
Pentagon to terminate $5.1B in IT contracts with Accenture, Deloitte
181–190 of 684 posts
Re: Pentagon to terminate $5.1B in IT contracts with Accenture, Deloitte
#182Earlier quoted context omitted.
unions should not be able to negotiate against the collective will of the people and seniority based leveling has been a disaster for the government in the US, at least.
You cannot ultimately chain people to their desks. What you either get is a "soft" withdrawal of labour (people refuse to take the job if they have any other choice available, as we're discussing upthread, so you get dregs), or the whole thing explodes into "illegal" strikes. Which are harder to resolve, because you made sure there's no one organisation to negotiate with.
the US has at-will employment, save it with the hyperbole. There are plenty of non-unionized jobs people would love to have.
Collective bargaining against private actors is fine. There should be no collective bargaining against the democratic will of the people, any more than some random group of federal workers has veto power over law passed bu congress. It is simply not how democracy works.
Re: Pentagon to terminate $5.1B in IT contracts with Accenture, Deloitte
#183Earlier quoted context omitted.
Which isn't ideal, but easily better than the pentagon that has literally never passed a full audit since they started auditing them in 2018. I'm a huge fan of musk's company's, but I don't want my public tax dollars ever choosing winners/losers
Musk's companies fail their audits too. Tesla can't account for $1.4B of government money they received.
Why does this matter? Government either gives loans and demands they are paid back, or pays for deliverables. If you have to keep your fingers in the books to feel good about what's happening, it was a badly structured contract.
Re: Pentagon to terminate $5.1B in IT contracts with Accenture, Deloitte
#184Kinda 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.
This is a misframing of the sentiment. No one believes there isn't waste in government. We just don't believe 5 under 20 year olds, some with criminal backgrounds, others whose only qualification is Elon Musk likes them, are good at identifying what's waste and what's important.
And we would like to see a measured approach to reducing waste, with some findings released to the people about what the plan is going forward and why the cuts make sense, rather than "just fire every probational employee" or "just 50% slash the SEC" or whatever else they are doing currently.
Re: Pentagon to terminate $5.1B in IT contracts with Accenture, Deloitte
#185On 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…
Oh, it's fine. They can hire help from Russia to secure our infrastructure for a very low price. With the tariffs it doesn't really make sense for China to bid, or they'd be paying US!
Eventual costs, well that's not really a concern and neither is national defense.
Re: Pentagon to terminate $5.1B in IT contracts with Accenture, Deloitte
#186Earlier quoted context omitted.
Eh, that might work out. https://www.theverge.com/news/617799/elon-musk-grok-ai-donal... > Elon Musk’s OpenAI rival, xAI, says it’s investigating why its Grok AI chatbot suggested that both President Donald Trump and Musk deserve the death penalty. xAI has already patched the issue and Grok will no longer give suggestions for who it thinks should receive capital punishment.
What do you mean?
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Re: Pentagon to terminate $5.1B in IT contracts with Accenture, Deloitte
#187Kinda 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.
There's a presumption in the logic of your statement here that if there is any waste in a program, it must be cut.
It turns out that there is generally waste in all operations; it doesn't follow that all operations should be terminated.
Re: Pentagon to terminate $5.1B in IT contracts with Accenture, Deloitte
#188Earlier quoted context omitted.
What do you mean?
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Oh, not at all.
AI goggles telling you who to kill is bad.
If they wind up implememented anyways, the program being cut very short via friendly-fire against the direct perpetrator of its implementation seems like the best bad-case scenario.
Like when Taliban bomb makers accidentally blow themselves up.
Re: Pentagon to terminate $5.1B in IT contracts with Accenture, Deloitte
#189Earlier quoted context omitted.
>> 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
Pay isn’t everything. Government civilian GS employees have an extremely generous benefits package and usually excellent job security. Contractors frequently take pay cuts to work directly as a government employee for these reasons.
Re: Pentagon to terminate $5.1B in IT contracts with Accenture, Deloitte
#190Earlier quoted context omitted.
they're a order of magnitude higher for some reasons though. I work in consulting, and occasionally larger enterprises approach our firm. We almost always decline because their requirements from vendor screening, to change review boards, to just the amount of sheer meetings it takes to enact a change to a title change on the website home page - its not worth it. A couple times we made the mistake of giving a 'go away…
This ^ and uncertainty If I had to break down how consulting contracts are actually priced, it'd be: - 50% work - 35% requirement ambiguity - 15% customer management overhead
Based on my experience with a smaller contractor, I think your overhead number is low. ;)