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Hertz paid Accenture $32M for a website that never went live (2019)

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Re: Hertz paid Accenture $32M for a website that never went live (2019)

#371

Post by KronisLV »

truemotive wrote: post #366
lawgimenez wrote: post #192

Earlier quoted context omitted.

When I graduated back on 2010, Accenture has been around and was invited for an interview but I somehow got cold feet. In my country Accenture is one of the longest established companies here that hires fresh graduates who don’t know anything. I believe a part of that team are fresh graduates and bureaucratic project managers who have no clue how technology works but got promoted because of the college they came from…

I wonder what country this is..

Currently living in Latvia, I've seen Accenture, Cognizant and other agencies have a strong presence in many local ICT events, such as DevTernity, Riga DevDays, DSS ITSEC and many others. I think that's just the way things are, they also advertise their vacancies to universities here and thus are many people's first experiences with software development in a professional setting. Of course, the results there vary, as with most jobs.

I don't think we have such a strong tech scene here or that many household names, to work in SaaS companies, though I've also just seen that quite a few EU job vacancies are for companies for whom software development is a supporting activity (sometimes very important, other times less so) as opposed to their main and only way of earning money.

Maybe I've just been looking in the wrong places, but I don't think almost any of my direct acquaintances work for SaaS/IaaS/PaaS vendors either.

Re: Hertz paid Accenture $32M for a website that never went live (2019)

#373

Post by throckmortra »

ThePadawan wrote: post #349
throckmortra wrote: post #59

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The only consulting firm I've ever heard spoken of somewhat favorably is McKinsey (and then only by ex-McKinsey people)

I unfortunately cannot second this - I went to college with a colleague who went on to work at McKinsey, and who I worked with on a project after he left them. At this point in his career, 3 years after his PhD, he was unable to do anything except put on cufflinks and produce 120-slide Powerpoint presentations that went 30min overtime like he was working for the DoD. It was an incredibly saddening sight. I talked to…

I agree that McKinsey sucks, just pointing out that it's the only one with a facade of prestige (anecdotally)

Re: Hertz paid Accenture $32M for a website that never went live (2019)

#374

Post by Ken_At_EM »

AtlasBarfed wrote: post #269
Ken_At_EM wrote: post #197

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Said another way, I think this covers “how they got so big” but not “how do they provide value.” I guess I have to admit they provide some value, but capture 99% for themselves? Makes me wonder if they’re actually destroying value overall?

ERP implementations likely provided value because of the lack of bespoke systems, instead people standardized and gained efficiencies. That was the value I would guess. Outsourcing? Did it provide value? Maybe immediately on the books, enough to cook to hit the stock options and cash out. Could companies have built internally? In an ideal world that's definitely a yes. Amazon sucks in so many ways, but one thing they…

Thank you for yet another detailed reply.

Reading the linked article all I could think was: Hertz doesn’t deserve to exist. It just seems like they’re a Frankenstein of 30 years of mediocre to poor decisions.

Ultimately I think a lot of companies that use Accenture don’t deserve to exist, and ultimately will be outcompeted.

Re: Hertz paid Accenture $32M for a website that never went live (2019)

#375

Post by eadmund »

eternalban wrote: post #240
game_the0ry wrote: post #189

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The only reason these companies are successful is that the top execs are friends with the other execs at fortune 500 companies so they mostly figure out a way to spin it as a success so everyone gets their bonuses even if no value was created. It is so bizarre that blowing $20M on a large, complex project that obviously fails can be rebranded as success. Its harder to pull that off with smaller projects and less st…

>> a very ambitious app for one of the biggest oil companies in the world An oil major probably makes $20MM in profit every few minutes or at most in an hour. (Apple makes ~1700.00 per second ..)

> An oil major probably makes $20MM in profit every few minutes or at most in an hour.

ExxonMobil made $23 billion in profit in 2021; that works out to just over three days and three hours to get to $20 million.

Shell made $20.6 billion in profit in 2021; it would take them even longer.

The other majors made even less.

A project which wastes over three days of profits is hugely expensive.

Re: Hertz paid Accenture $32M for a website that never went live (2019)

#376

Post by sbarbarian »

googlryas wrote: post #7
rich_sasha wrote: post #3

My main question is: who hires Accenture for this kind of job, for no less than $32m??? They would be my last point of call, literally after my mum, and maybe even after my dog. At least he's cheap.

Hertz hired a new CIO in 2015, and you can't just come in and keep the ship running in the same direction. You need new, big, flashy changes! Not just $32M, actually over $400M in changes, to prove the CIO knows what he's doing. Compare the article with the CIO's self provided description of his 3 years at Hertz(from his Linkedin): > I was hired by Hertz to integrate and optimize technology infrastructure following t…

not sure about the case here, but a common executive play I've seen at bigcorps is: 1. take credit for what was in-flight when you came in 2. kick off massive projects which you can't possibly be around to measure before you bounce to the next gig 3. switch roles / bounce and blame it on your successor (if anyone bothers to follow up / ask)

Re: Hertz paid Accenture $32M for a website that never went live (2019)

#377

Post by eadmund »

> The company launches a major end-to-end technology upgrade program that includes outsourcing operations of its legacy systems to IBM

That right there is a warning sign. It may make sense to outsource legacy systems after their replacement is ready; it makes no sense to outsource them before it has even been started.

Re: Hertz paid Accenture $32M for a website that never went live (2019)

#378

Post by ctrager »

b0afc375b5 wrote: post #219
ctrager wrote: post #154

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Another golden memory of that project was when I was given the assignment to meet with users - accounting people - on screens for approving tax payments. It was kinda a big deal for me at that stage in my career, to even talk to users. So, I meet with these guys and I introduce the topic, and they go, "What are you talking about? What do you mean 'approving'? They are taxes. We HAVE to pay them"

I'm not sure I get what you're trying to say here. Yes, the company has to pay them but someone has to look at the numbers so that the company doesn't overpay or underpay.

Hmmm, what am I trying to say... I guess... as I think about it now, the lines of communication were very hierarchical - up and down the chain. But when it was time for me, a tech guy at the bottom, to talk to a user on the front lines, the disconnect was hilarious to me - but maybe you had to be there... I feel like I'm a boring old man telling this story.

Re: Hertz paid Accenture $32M for a website that never went live (2019)

#379

Post by b0afc375b5 »

ctrager wrote: post #378
b0afc375b5 wrote: post #219

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I'm not sure I get what you're trying to say here. Yes, the company has to pay them but someone has to look at the numbers so that the company doesn't overpay or underpay.

Hmmm, what am I trying to say... I guess... as I think about it now, the lines of communication were very hierarchical - up and down the chain. But when it was time for me, a tech guy at the bottom, to talk to a user on the front lines, the disconnect was hilarious to me - but maybe you had to be there... I feel like I'm a boring old man telling this story.

Ahh I see. I can understand why it would bring you back that memory. I was just confused at first, cheers!

Re: Hertz paid Accenture $32M for a website that never went live (2019)

#380

Post by ctrager »

listenallyall wrote: post #314
ctrager wrote: post #152

Earlier quoted context omitted.

LOL and true to my experience. In the 80's was a United Airlines employee on a project where Arthur Anderson (aka Accenture) was the consultant. The project included approximately 75 entry level AA programmers that were brought to the office on two big buses. My job was to write specs for them. The specs had to be 100% detailed, every "if", every "loop", except that I had to follow the AA methodology and write the en…

Just curious, but in the 1980's, what viable alternatives did you have to pen and paper? Did Visio exist? Did any flowchart tools exist, for DOS? For Apple ][? If they did, could you navigate, or print, a hundreds-to-thousands page flowchart in one of those OS'es?

If I had just written the program directly, I could have TYPED, and I could have used the backspace and delete keys to erase instead of an ACTUAL eraser, and I could have used cut and paste instead of ACTUAL scissors and paste.

Plus, I could have used the compile, test, debug cycle to verify that what I was writing actually worked.

My specs were the same complexity as the code: Let's pretend, for example, there were no "sort" statement in the computer language. My spec couldn't just say, "sort the names in alphabetical order". My spec had to have the exact logic of a sort algorithm, but drawn as a flowchart (actually, not a flowchart but an AA proprietary format)

I didn't have to do "sort", but I did have to code algorithms that were more complex than that.

BTW, to make it more fun, there were rules about who was allowed to talk to whom. I was not allowed to talk to the programmer who had to retype my spec into actual code. I didn't even know who he/she was. And the programmer wasn't allowed to talk to me directly, but had to go up a chain.

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