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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

#401

Post by next_xibalba »

rahimnathwani wrote: post #157
rtkwe wrote: post #135

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And they got caught by the system already... You can't just snap your fingers, destroy the entire apparatus of academia and get it back again on a whim. It'd be a century or more to rebuild fully if you really did try to start over again. The impulse to cheat is even exacerbated by thinner funding not fixed by it because you're pressed extremely hard to get results to justify the next grant, and your tenure board in…

What do you mean 'they were caught by the system already'? Claudine Gay is still employed by Harvard. According to her Wikipedia page, she is the "Wilbur A. Cowett Professor of Government and of African and African-American Studies at Harvard University". And she wasn't exposed by folks in academia, but by people outside that system.

Tessier-Lavigne only resigned from Stanford’s presidency and remained on the faculty. His case was far worse in my opinion. His research consumed millions of dollars and resulted in the misdirection of further millions downstream. Everyone knew Gay’s work was useless BS, it just also turned out to contain plagiarism.

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

#402

Post by bhouston »

mellosouls wrote: post #283
leguminous wrote: post #279

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

They still don't generally need to use consultants. Even at the poor rates of pay in many government teams, there are still some decent technical staff who don't just chase the dollar. Bear in mind the salary standard is normal market, not FAANG/SV. Consultants are nearly always used so that managers can say "we went with BigCo, its their fault" when things go wrong. ie. they are generally a political choice rather t…

Another reason why consultants are good in government is because of unions. I am generally pro-union, but a side effect of unions, at least in my experience, is that you will have a proportion of incompetent people who can not complete anything and you can not effectively get rid of them. Consultants who are clearly incompetent or even just not a good fit are much easier to get rid of.

Although the large consulting firms are also not great if they are just shipping software requirements overseas for cheap software dev labor, that also can be very ineffective. So many never ending government projects are a result of this. On the surface everything is competently managed (grant charts forever, with perfect org charts), but at the strategic level of actually getting it to work and on-time is lacking (because there are a ton of cautious "professional managers" who don't know how to actually ship.)

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

#403

Post by Arubis »

Even a stopped clock is right twice a day. It's kind of amazing to me how much USGov business Accenture continued to soak up after the misfired start of healthcare.gov. Their core competency is pretty clearly acquiring contracts, not fulfilling them.

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

#404

Post by BeetleB »

nothercastle wrote: post #393
BeetleB wrote: post #201

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Government civilian GS employees have an extremely generous benefits package and usually excellent job security. Had. Not have.

Yep this was true a decade or 2 ago not true anymore. Generous compared to Walmart, sure but not compared to Industry for any type of Technical work.

Yeah, I was referring to the job security aspect, given all the layoffs.

But yes, the federal package is good, but not fantastic. It's on par with what a typical company provides. Salary is decent, too. Not FAANG, but not below industry average. More or less, just like a typical industry job.

State/city jobs tend to have much better benefit packages, but lower pay (often a lot lower). They also tend to be relatively chill workwise.

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

#405

Post by glitchc »

SamuelAdams wrote: post #379
glitchc wrote: post #347

It's interesting reading conversations in this thread. Everyone wants government to hire competent individuals. Yet, when it comes to a personal choice, the very same individuals decline the lower compensation. Everyone then wants government to pay salaries comparable to the private sector. Yet no one wants to pay extra (income, land, sales) taxes to actually support the massive increase in government spending that's…

The narrative around fed jobs has changed recently too. A fed job used to be a lower salary, but much stronger job security. Now with the new administration government job security is gone, so federal jobs overall are simply not as attractive anymore.

I don't think this applies. According to the stories here, folks were choosing out of Fed jobs even when gold-plated pensions were the norm.

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

#406

Post by grandempire »

mlinhares wrote: post #44
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.

Because we shouldn't be cutting research, healthcare and social security if we want to have a future as a society.

Society existed before social security.

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

#408

Post by next_xibalba »

mnky9800n wrote: post #252
next_xibalba wrote: post #108

Earlier quoted context omitted.

[flagged]

Don’t hate the player hate the game. Academia has been perforated with metric driven nonsense from administration at all levels of funding and the university. It is not possible to quantify how much work it takes to generate a new idea that will downstream benefit humanity. This metric driven academic reality has led to two outcomes. An over production of papers on every topic. And the reduction of research into pred…

I do hate the game. That’s why I wrote, “burn it down and start over again clean”. It is a broken, sclerotic system who misincentives have metastasized (ie all the issues you’ve just described).

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

#409

Post by RajT88 »

mellosouls wrote: post #283
leguminous wrote: post #279

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

They still don't generally need to use consultants. Even at the poor rates of pay in many government teams, there are still some decent technical staff who don't just chase the dollar. Bear in mind the salary standard is normal market, not FAANG/SV. Consultants are nearly always used so that managers can say "we went with BigCo, its their fault" when things go wrong. ie. they are generally a political choice rather t…

Not just that political reason - you can scale a workforce up and down much more quickly with them.

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

#410

Post by FloorEgg »

anon84873628 wrote: post #382
Vegenoid wrote: post #354

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Even if this is the case, “process” is immensely more important in government and military than in companies because government has the authority, the prerogative even, to use violence, ruin lives, and kill people. The onerous processes are in place to protect civilians. When you shoot from the hip at a tech company, the bad outcome is that a lot of money gets wasted and people lose their jobs. When the federal gover…

Plus, many of the laws government has to follow are exactly about the process by which things are done. That is what helps ensure it is fair, effective, transparent, etc.

I agree, but what was fair and effective in 1970 might not be anymore, right?

Do you agree that these processes need to evolve over time?

And if so, what if they haven't been evolving as fast as the rest of the world and have fallen behind?

What is a leader to do, when many processes no longer are in anyone's best interest other than the people who maintain them and those have learned to exploit them?

The government doesn't seem like a machine to me, more like society's nervous system. It's a very scary idea that it has become so rigid and so outdated that a massive overhaul is necessary. It does seem like an opening for extremism (fascism, tyranny), which I'm sure we both fear. I just find it very hard to tell whether disrupting the system or letting it continue will lead to a better outcome for Americans.

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