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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

#221

Post by jjk166 »

cpa wrote: post #35
ultim8k wrote: post #27

Most of the time gov, orgs and companies don't listen to their in-house engineers but will pay $$$ to some consulting firm, only to confirm the same thing or just to show that "they are taking actions towards the solution". In some cases there is distrust from management on in-house employees or in some other cases they want to show quick results without distracting their teams from their planned tasks. Of course the…

The people working inside the company may be both judge and party to the issue, it’s not always a bad idea to call in consultants. Do you prefer independent and somewhat misinformed or stakeholder to the issue and knowledgeable?

If you can't trust your people, why are they your people? The consultants are going to get the story from your people anyways (even if they do their own data collection, your people are going to tell them where to look), so it's not like you're actually eliminating the bias, you're just obfuscating it.

You hire consultants when obfuscation is the point - it's not Jim from down the hall saying this, its the consultants. Sometimes there are legitimate reasons for obfuscation, but it's always some variation on "so and so needs to hear this, just not from me."

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

#222

Post by jjk166 »

anal_reactor wrote: post #43
ultim8k wrote: post #27

Most of the time gov, orgs and companies don't listen to their in-house engineers but will pay $$$ to some consulting firm, only to confirm the same thing or just to show that "they are taking actions towards the solution". In some cases there is distrust from management on in-house employees or in some other cases they want to show quick results without distracting their teams from their planned tasks. Of course the…

What if your in-house engineers are morons but you need to have one particular project done correctly. I don't understand the glorification of normal engineers - quite often they're normal people drawn from normal distribution, with all consequences of that.

Why would you hire, and then knowingly continue to employ, morons? Your employees are not chosen at random, you can evaluate their skills and select the ones optimal for your organization, as demonstrated both by their prior experience and their work performance under your employment.

On the other hand, the people you get from the consulting firm, who were not hired with your particular needs in mind, and who are assigned by leaders who are both unfamiliar with what you do and have motivations which may not be perfectly aligned with yours, are normal people drawn essentially at random from a normal distribution. Maybe you don't need to have a particular skillset in house full time, but the person whose job is to do something will always outperform the person whose job is to maximize billable hours.

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

#223

Post by ajfkeufh »

decimalenough wrote: post #64
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.

From my experience with using a $WITCH for a large support engagement, the A team woos you, the B team is what you get initially, and as soon as they think you've got your eye off the ball, they swap in the Z team. This was for a contract where we made it very clear that quality/skill was paramount and we would happily pay above market rates forever if they could maintain it. Of course they got greedy and lost the de…

I see you contracted with tptacek's Latacora too.

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

#224

Post by emmelaich »

HelloUsername wrote: post #108
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?

Oops. I'm pretty sure I had a much older article but must've fouled up my copy'n'paste.

But while I'm here .. https://retractionwatch.com/2024/03/04/kpmg-government-repor...

"KPMG government report on research integrity makes up reference involving Retraction Watch founders"

An August 2023 report on research integrity by consulting firm KPMG, commissioned by an Australian government agency, contains a made-up reference, Retraction Watch has discovered.

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

#225

Post by AlotOfReading »

guywithahat wrote: post #217
AlotOfReading wrote: post #214

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Fast and productive is very different than good . I'd probably agree with a description of AI code as the fast food of code, but I certainly wouldn't call Taco Bell "better" if the wedding caterer showed up with it.

I think you're looking for lexical gaps where there are none. If you're not using LLM's while coding, you're behind the industry. While GenAI may be overhyped, it's not a fad, and if you don't incorporate it into your (what I assume is a) software based job you're going to fall behind your coworkers. I can't list every positive adjective here but it's an incredibly useful tool which everyone should be using.

I'm using them, but frankly only for things where my quality bar is lower. I've seen little evidence that anyone is routinely getting work that's comparable to competent humans, excepting incredibly recent work like Joshua Rodgers' [0]. And I'll note that even Joshua's work was mainly successful in identifying issues, but actually fixing them involved much more human intervention.

[0] https://joshua.hu/llm-engineer-review-sast-security-ai-tools...

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

#226

Post by stogot »

OkayPhysicist wrote: post #164
citizenpaul wrote: post #163

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I really do think that this type of AI use is going to become a true life/death epidemic. The people at Deloitte are not generally dumb unmotivated people. They are ruthless $$ chasers and if AI is allowed they will use it to check the boxes and move onto the next paycheck. Many of these people will effectively have their life ruined. Many will likely take their own life. Its not just harmless paperwork fudging when…

[flagged]

Consulting (good consulting anyways) requires the skill of teaching, so this doesn’t ring true. The adage is “those that can’t do, manage” which isn’t factual either

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

#227

Post by about3fitty »

tstrimple wrote: post #190
Gigachad wrote: post #71

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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.

Government literally cannot pay for high level tech talent. I’ve been working on a very large cloud migration for a state government. I’ve actually been really impressed with their core technical teams relative to large enterprise teams I’ve worked with. I was actually tempted to look at what the state pays their employees knowing it would be a decent pay cut. The top level CTO type person for the state that has ulti…

As a former employee of state and local government, who walked away from both pensions, this was my takeaway.

At the beginning of a project, the government could spend above market for a great architect to lay down the data model and put some patterns in place which could then be reasonably well maintained by below market rate staff, but there are rules and public pressure.

Interestingly, my local govt hired Deloitte to put in a serverless AWS-based application that could have been a simple CRUD app hosted on a medium EC2 instance. It cost $1.5 million and didn’t work, in addition to the hundreds of thousands per year in cloud costs.

Could have been a Django app with Celery. The cost could have been in the low thousands per year.

It could even have been done with a succinct AWS serverless system.

But that’s not the schmooze that can impress high level stakeholders, themselves less familiar with good design patterns, and win the contract.

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

#228

Post by array_key_first »

lostlogin wrote: post #191
orthecreedence wrote: post #175

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sincerely, ICE

When humans want a scapegoat, the target is often chosen based on race. What will AI pick on?

At this point just save the compute and buy a big Price is Right wheel.

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

#229

Post by array_key_first »

ceridwyn wrote: post #181
xmcqdpt2 wrote: post #81

Earlier quoted context omitted.

In Canada the problem has mainly been that the government aren’t allowed or willing to pay software engineers enough to compete with industry, but they are allowed to spend seemingly arbitrary amounts of money on services provided by external firms. To give an idea, we have a big scandal right now related to IBM and other contractors charging the Quebec government a lot of money for defective software for the car lic…

That's okay though because the company will then hire subcontractors in Quebec through an agency. So instead of Canada paying 150k for a dev with experience, they pay a firm 200k to pay an agency 100k to give a junior dev in Montreal 50k for the work.

Ahh, accountability engineering! The hidden engineering discipline!

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

#230

Post by lazyeye »

lostlogin wrote: post #191
orthecreedence wrote: post #175

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Sincerely, ICE

When humans want a scapegoat, the target is often chosen based on race. What will AI pick on?

I think its based on immigration status which is different from race.
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