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

The customers are big companies with huge budgets, and a lot of red tape. The guarantees they want the most are legal. If things don't go well in a project, or if a project isn't implemented on time, they want to have someone to sue. Someone that will not simply go bankrupt and disappear. "Quality" is almost a nice to have, compared to the legal guarantees.

Enter the Consultancy companies. They have a huge amount of workers, a lot of them fresh out of university. The quality of the work they produce might not be great, but when problems arise, they can always throw more people at the problem (or to make them work longer unpaid hours). They are sometimes called "meatfarms", because of this. They will not go bankrupt easily.

The way these companies develop software is by third parties, often overseas, sometimes, frequently via several intermediate companies, each one adding their cut.

I must stress out that it work. Boring, soul-crushing at times. But it is not easy. Just dealing with the red tape is a job on itself. The kind of contract that needed to be written before a medium-sized project has to be very detailed. It details things like what will happen when the project derails, what will be the penalty and who will pay what. It's a small book.

Source: I was one of those "fresh out of college" people when I joined Accenture. I once was asked to estimate how much would it cost to change one (static) website's scrollbar color from default to yellow. The quote for that change alone, perhaps 10 LOC change implemented by someone in India, was 3000 euros. This was around 2010. I was glad when they offered me a severance package.

Big corporations and governments aren’t startups in which everyone is encouraged to do as they please in service of the mission. Corporations and governments hire people for very specific roles with very specific responsibilities. Stepping outside of your responsibilities is discouraged. Employees inside big organizations have to think, “how fucked am I if I make this decision and it goes wrong?”. A startup can write off big losses without a second thought, a big corporate or government has to investigate.

If you need to make a big decision, you don’t let an intern take a shot at it, even if they are convinced they have the perfect idea, because if it goes wrong, it’s on your head — which idiot let an intern fuck it up?

You bring in consultants who are (ostensibly) experts so that your responsibility ends at having done the right thing and if anything goes wrong, it’s not on your head.

I'm the CEO and I don't really like it when the annoying guy down the hall tells me what to do, so I'm gonna spend $50,000 and have a team come in and interview everybody and then they'll tell me the same thing the annoying guy said, for years, but because they're outside consultants, I'll listen to them when they say it.

I was an IT consultant. A big energy company wanted to go to the AWS cloud. Their folks were too busy and had no experience. We (my consultancy company) already had the knowledge.

Consultants don't only give advice. In many cases, they also do the work. But advice is also a "product". If your in-house team does not have the knowledge or time, you hire a consultancy firm.