Hacker News Board Hacker News, browsed like a classic message board
Live data from Hacker News

Pentagon to terminate $5.1B in IT contracts with Accenture, Deloitte

reuters.com

Post reply on HN
Print view View original

201–210 of 684 posts

Re: Pentagon to terminate $5.1B in IT contracts with Accenture, Deloitte

#201

Post by BeetleB »

_mlbt wrote: post #189
nothercastle wrote: post #164

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

> Government civilian GS employees have an extremely generous benefits package and usually excellent job security.

Had. Not have.

Re: Pentagon to terminate $5.1B in IT contracts with Accenture, Deloitte

#202

Post by whimsicalism »

ijustlovemath wrote: post #163
aerostable_slug wrote: post #151

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

fda reviewers are extremely out of distribution relative to almost every government worker except those at, say, the Fed. i would caution against trying to generalize that because it is mostly people taking a short term stint out of their profssional/academic career.

sorta like dining in a michelin restaraunt and deciding that cafeteria workers are really good at cooking

Re: Pentagon to terminate $5.1B in IT contracts with Accenture, Deloitte

#203

Post by emilamlom »

kouru225 wrote: post #139
next_xibalba wrote: post #108

Earlier quoted context omitted.

[flagged]

So two people lied and you wanna get rid of the system that caught them?

It's like people took the idiom "throwing the baby out with the bathwater" as a thing to aspire to.

Re: Pentagon to terminate $5.1B in IT contracts with Accenture, Deloitte

#204

Post by reciprocity »

bgirard wrote: post #53
ibejoeb wrote: post #21

Kinda 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.

The opinion here isn't homogenous. You'll find a wide range of opinion. It will shift based on which posters are active at a given time, or even from minor nuances in the story.

I, too, find it bothersome when people refer to an opinion written in a post and generalizes as if it were the opinion of an entire community. HN is not one person and it's incorrect to refer to it as if it is.

Re: Pentagon to terminate $5.1B in IT contracts with Accenture, Deloitte

#205

Post by lotsofpulp »

ceejayoz wrote: post #198
_mlbt wrote: post #189

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

That ship has sailed now, though. The benefits and job security can no longer be counted on. Government is gonna have to compete more on salary, or accept worse candidates.

A silver lining in all this upheaval is the reduction of price obfuscation (hopefully) by getting rid of deferred compensation schemes that make it difficult for labor sellers to evaluate the market.

Re: Pentagon to terminate $5.1B in IT contracts with Accenture, Deloitte

#206

Post by timschmidt »

toomuchtodo wrote: post #112
TrapLord_Rhodo wrote: post #101

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Most of those subs linked are from direct negotations from the state, and they are in the form of tax incentives, not cash in account. How are you going to use that against a company that nevada agreed to give them X amount of tax incentives over a year if they build a giga factory there? Using that as a justification that "tesla only lives because of tax payer money" is ridiculous. Also, poking around the SpaceX dat…

I am not here to talk you out of your mental model around the cult of Elon. His companies have received almost $40B in various forms of government support, those are the facts. He is a skilled operator, able to whip teams of engineers to success and distort reality persuasively to customers and investors alike, but his ventures would not have survived without the government support he’s received.

Phone me when someone else lands an orbital class rocket or offers a cheaper ton to LEO. Until then you're complaining about the lowest bidder. And you're going to have a hard time convincing me that the lowest bidder is doing anything but saving their customers money on a service they were already intent on purchasing, and had previously been spending 2x - 10x for: https://www.reddit.com/r/space/comments/753q6s/economic_comp...

Re: Pentagon to terminate $5.1B in IT contracts with Accenture, Deloitte

#207

Post by pmontra »

_JamesA_ wrote: post #161

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.

Or: you both get fired but they hire you because of all the money they made anyway.

Re: Pentagon to terminate $5.1B in IT contracts with Accenture, Deloitte

#208

Post by misnome »

1024core wrote: post #162
aantix wrote: post #129

Earlier 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!

I’m paid to work on OSS.

Re: Pentagon to terminate $5.1B in IT contracts with Accenture, Deloitte

#209

Post by IncreasePosts »

splitrocket wrote: post #59
ibejoeb wrote: post #21

Kinda 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.

"War is just a racket. A racket is best described, I believe, as something that is not what it seems to the majority of people. Only a small inside group knows what it is about. It is conducted for the benefit of the very few at the expense of the masses." - Major General Smedley Butler https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Smedley_Butler "Every gun that is made, every warship launched, every rocket fired signifies in the fi…

I know a lot of people who love to quote Smedley and Eisenhower's farewell address, and to a person they support military intervention in Ukraine. Also, people who unironically were saying "The USA shouldn't be the world police!" 10 years ago.

Re: Pentagon to terminate $5.1B in IT contracts with Accenture, Deloitte

#210

Post by UncleMeat »

next_xibalba wrote: post #108
mikeocool wrote: post #75

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I have experience in technology and biomedical research. IT consultants, particularly from the large firms, are very overpriced for the value they provide. Blindly cutting NIH grants (even some of the ones that sound silly on paper) and funding for research institutions is doing great harm to progress in modern medicine. Multiple things can be true at once.

[flagged]

Have you actually reviewed the plagiarism examples to confidently say that this would lead to the expulsion of undergrads?
Post reply on HN