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

reuters.com

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

#321

Post by kjkjadksj »

gsky wrote: post #225

I signed up for linkedin with my Mobile number. I was asked to use the mobile app (I tried Android app) to validate the profile. Guess what there is no mobile input field to login. That's billion dollar business for you. Software industry is run by medicore people at this point

Yep. Mobile version of reddit is basically unusable on my se2. Page hangs and doesn’t finish loading, only shows like 1 or 2 comments and no child replies vs the whole thread. Old.reddit.com loads instantly of course, except if I am coming from a mobile reddit link then it will hang and require a browser restart as closing the tab and using a new one isn’t even enough.

Remind me their valuation again to produce a junk product and ride on the coattails of an otherwise simple and reliable website that they’d rather not exist again?

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

#322

Post by timacles »

nelblu wrote: post #20

Good riddance, and hopefully they won't be missed. Here in Canada these consultants are just leeches who suck up all the tax dollars which could actually be used for something useful.

You guys are way too optimistic, they’re just going to pass these contracts to trump, musk and Peter theil buddies. Charge more money and also introduce some nepharious bullshit like AI data scraping

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

#323

Post by grandempire »

Aurornis wrote: post #215
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 internet comment section “pick a side and deride the other” doesn’t work on these situations. Two things can be bad at once. The IT consulting can be too expensive. Cutting it all at once with no other plan can have disastrous consequences. Rash moves like this are things politicians and corporate ladder climbers alike love to do, but then they run far away from the consequences. They know they can convince enoug…

> Cutting it all at once with no other plan can have disastrous consequences.

I think this part is overestimated. It will get fixed.

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

#324

Post by rdsubhas »

Aurornis wrote: post #215
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 internet comment section “pick a side and deride the other” doesn’t work on these situations. Two things can be bad at once. The IT consulting can be too expensive. Cutting it all at once with no other plan can have disastrous consequences. Rash moves like this are things politicians and corporate ladder climbers alike love to do, but then they run far away from the consequences. They know they can convince enoug…

From the article:

> The contracts "represent non-essential spending on third party consultants" for services Pentagon employees can perform

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

#325

Post by grandempire »

wormlord wrote: post #48
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.

Public health research is good. Bombing civilians in the third world is bad. Do you get it now?

> Public health research is good.

This is basically a tautology. The question is what’s actually being funded in the name of public health. Wasting money in pursuit of public health which doesn’t help the public is bad actually,

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

#326

Post by tclancy »

grandempire wrote: post #323
Aurornis wrote: post #215

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The internet comment section “pick a side and deride the other” doesn’t work on these situations. Two things can be bad at once. The IT consulting can be too expensive. Cutting it all at once with no other plan can have disastrous consequences. Rash moves like this are things politicians and corporate ladder climbers alike love to do, but then they run far away from the consequences. They know they can convince enoug…

> Cutting it all at once with no other plan can have disastrous consequences. I think this part is overestimated. It will get fixed.

By whom?

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

#327

Post by netbioserror »

heisenbit wrote: post #217

Consultants are misused if employed on a constant basis instead of employing enough senior staff directly. There are well known drivers on both sides that tend to promote such an unhealthy setup. What is concerning at the US government is not cutting consulting but at the same time cutting staff and on top creating a hostile environment for senior staff. This is unprecedented and is not something one would do in the…

I hope senior government staff face hostility exactly proportionate to the salaries and budgets they've extracted from the US populace through taxation and inflation, alongside the foreign influence far too many of them are responsible for peddling. The government is not a jobs program, and they owe the people, not the other way around.

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

#328

Post by mattfca »

miltonlost wrote: post #287
CityOfThrowaway wrote: post #268

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The data on hostile takeovers by "corporate raiders" very much does not support the characterization here. The category of PE firms you're talking about buy companies that are deeply troubled. Generally due to the management's unwillingness to accept reality and make change, the company is heading towards oblivion one way or another. Perhaps surprisingly, the vast majority of takeover targets wind up as net job creat…

> One of my laments is that there is no automatic equivalent force in the government. Agencies grow and grow, projects grow and grow, all totally decoupled from whether they are achieving any progress whatsoever towards the agency's mission. There was. It's the GAO and the inspectors general of the agencies, both of which have been gutted by this administration. > I'm not defending the specific actions of this admini…

you cant call out a bias when you are doing the exact same thing.

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

#329

Post by adamgordonbell »

leguminous wrote: post #279
heisenbit wrote: post #217

Consultants are misused if employed on a constant basis instead of employing enough senior staff directly. There are well known drivers on both sides that tend to promote such an unhealthy setup. What is concerning at the US government is not cutting consulting but at the same time cutting staff and on top creating a hostile environment for senior staff. This is unprecedented and is not something one would do in the…

Part of the reason the US government needs to use consultants is because they can't actually pay enough to hire senior developers directly due to the constraints imposed by the GS pay scales. Often times the top levels of the pay scale aren't even available because there is some rule about how people can't be paid more than someone else. So instead they pay for consultants and all of their overhead. (Of course there…

Theoretically, there's some sort of arbitrage happening.

There is some department in the government that's very unsexy and has a very real problem that could be solved by a smart finance MBA student diligently working on it. But there's no way that diligent young employee would want that job. Nor no way if he had it that anyone would take him seriously and put his changes in place.

He doesn't want to work for that unsexy department. The people at that unsexy department do not want to work for him.

Put a consulting company in the middle and he has a job title that sounds cool and that organization gets their problem solved.

( This is how someone explained business consulting to me. )

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

#330

Post by cavisne »

callamdelaney wrote: post #64

Now 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.

In addition they use their government work to increase private sector profits, either implicitly "we work with your government" or explicitly (PWC offering briefings on tax policy they were helping with to the targets of the tax policy)
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