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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

#451

Post by NegativeK »

bumby wrote: post #374
ksec wrote: post #313

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It shouldn't be market rate because you get job safety. Most have never worked in private sector before and has no idea. Salary should be dependent on Jobs nature and ability. Not by grade. Currently it is simply a power structure and hierarchy. People should be promoted on merit. Unfortunately most working in public sector lack the ability to judge. If you think power play, bureaucracy and failing up is a thing in l…

> Most have never worked in private sector before and has no idea. The average tenure in the U.S. government is 8.2 years. The average age is 47.2 years old. I don’t know how to reconcile the facts with your claim. Either most have been unemployed for a couple decades before coming to work for the government or it has some wonky distribution or something else is going on that you should elaborate on.

I can't speak to the UK at all, but I've met less than five people who started their government jobs right out of high school or college. They'll be able to retire on their pension 33 years later at about 3/4 of their max salary -- so, at roughly 51 or 55. (The pensions are funded by employee contributions.)

It's well known in the workplace who they are, because people are really fucking envious.

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

#452

Post by exe34 »

idrios wrote: post #435

Anecdotally, a friend of mine works for a state department of transportation and has been trying to get a developer and a DBA to replace some people who've recently left. He's been having an insanely hard time finding anyone for the role, and not because of salary requirements. He's required to vet candidates through approved sources and so his department uses a recruitment firm that keeps sending him resumes from pe…

he should just hire some high school script kiddies, they already have access to the highest level of government!

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

#453

Post by 98codes »

idrios wrote: post #435

Anecdotally, a friend of mine works for a state department of transportation and has been trying to get a developer and a DBA to replace some people who've recently left. He's been having an insanely hard time finding anyone for the role, and not because of salary requirements. He's required to vet candidates through approved sources and so his department uses a recruitment firm that keeps sending him resumes from pe…

Getting onto the allowed vendor list for the US Government is a dire process even for the largest of global service companies, by design by the folks already on the list.

I was able to work as an individual as a subcontractor for a subcontractor for a company on the list. Rates aren't as high, but with federal regulations (for now) mandating that subcontractors be paid as soon as the primary contract holder was paid meant that there was 0 chasing after invoices which is actually very nice.

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

#454

Post by t-writescode »

grandempire wrote: post #447
t-writescode wrote: post #427

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Breaking critical systems like SNAP, Medicare/Medicaid, weather forecasting and many many many other systems that people literally depend on for their being alive *kills* people. Programmers that work on critical systems are actively trained to take into consideration every contingency to not increase the death rate of their systems, to the best of their abilities. Aggressive, comprehensive and non-robust axing of sy…

This is a nerd fantasy where you imagine your skills and expertise are what keep society turning. Computer problems are fixable, and they are secondary, and there are many people and services who can be hired to fix them.

What are you on about? The systems I'm referring to are human systems with lots of humans doing human things. Cutting funding, removing departments, those are removing the humans doing human things to solve human problems.

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

#455

Post by rrr_oh_man »

abakker wrote: post #436
PeterStuer wrote: post #394

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You have to understand consultancies in IT are just brokers. They buy in "inventory" of "profiles" at as low a cost as possible, and sell that inventory to their customers for as much as possible. So you've got your CS graduate which you recruit and pay $40/hr, slap a badge on them and rent them out for $120/hr. Once in a while you fall short and need to hire some freelancers for $60/hr. That's it. As your gov agency…

I think it is important to distinguish between Consulting, Staff Augmentation, and Managed Services. Many of the large integrators/consultancies do all of these options, but the objectives, contract sizes, and durations of the contracts are all expected to be different. Consulting - best though of projects, governance, and on-demand expertise. There are definitely junior resources in play, but the objective is to bui…

The people who care about these distinctions are mostly within those three groups. For the customers it's 'consulting'.

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

#456

Post by mikeocool »

next_xibalba wrote: post #108
mikeocool wrote: post #75

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I have experience in technology and biomedical research. IT consultants, particularly from the large firms, are very overpriced for the value they provide. Blindly cutting NIH grants (even some of the ones that sound silly on paper) and funding for research institutions is doing great harm to progress in modern medicine. Multiple things can be true at once.

[flagged]

Claudine Gay's political science and African-American studies research was funded by NIH?

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

#457

Post by whimsicalism »

rtkwe wrote: post #443
whimsicalism wrote: post #177

Earlier quoted context omitted.

i think we are approximately 30T beyond "slow and thoughtful approach to cutting". if you want your program to be considered carefully, pass it with the necessary tax increases to fund it. don't just punt the tax receipts problem to the next guy. of course, if Trump is doing this all so he can pass his tax cuts as seems almost certain, he is no better. but frankly yes, the US needs deep cuts and concordant tax receip…

You have to absolutely think about what you're actually cutting loads of programs and spending end up with positive net effects. If you just demand across the board cuts you're killing those positive EV programs which leave you worse off than before. The debt boogey man is exactly that a nearly imaginary number, most US debt is held by Americans or US companies in the end too.

> The debt boogey man is exactly that a nearly imaginary number, most US debt is held by Americans or US companies in the end too.

I agree that the problem with debt is not that there are foreign holders of US treasuries. But higher debt crowds out private investment & borrowing in the repo markets, which harms productivity, makes goods more expensive, hurts aggregate supply in the long run, and makes the poor even poorer.

It also means that the US has to pay increasingly high amounts of money on interest financing and the Fed has far less room to effectively maneuver to combat inflation and ensure sustainable employment levels, as we've been seeing in the last few years. Debt is absolutely not an imaginary number and anyone who is telling you that perhaps doesn't understand the economic weight.

The marginal dollar of US govt spending is generally not more welfare enhancing than the alternative of not having that debt, not crowding out private investment, etc. - particularly when we are in expansionary times (as we have up until very recently). With our current debt trajectory, we should be raising non-distortionary taxes and aggressively limiting spending that is not obviously growth enhancing or with strong social justice justification. We are starting to see real structural problems already emerging from our current debt trajectory.

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

#458

Post by immibis »

monero-xmr wrote: post #357
Spooky23 wrote: post #339

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It’s amazing that people so committed to constitutional principles were able to enact the largest tax increase in history without the advice and consent of congress. Impressive even for tax and spend republicans. In democracy loving areas of the British Empire, that type of arbitrary action led to revolutions.

Huh? Trump won the popular vote. Maybe make better arguments in the next election if you don't like the current leader, rather than a violent revolution to overturn a democratically elected leader

Adolf Hitler was also democratically elected.

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

#459

Post by ethbr1 »

BeetleB wrote: post #404
nothercastle wrote: post #393

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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…

> tend to be relatively chill workwise

This feels like something that needed past tense.

Some rich asshole I don't know blasting out weekly check-in demands to the org-wide list doesn't sound very chill.

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

#460

Post by grandempire »

t-writescode wrote: post #454
grandempire wrote: post #447

Earlier quoted context omitted.

This is a nerd fantasy where you imagine your skills and expertise are what keep society turning. Computer problems are fixable, and they are secondary, and there are many people and services who can be hired to fix them.

What are you on about? The systems I'm referring to are human systems with lots of humans doing human things. Cutting funding, removing departments, those are removing the humans doing human things to solve human problems.

This is what I replied to in my comment above:

> 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.

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