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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

#561

Post by bumby »

wiether wrote: post #421
bumby wrote: post #374

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> 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.

The tenure is for the job or overall in the government? Here in France it's quite common for government employees to jump through agencies during their career, so the average tenure at a job or even at an agency is not quite big. Also, keep in mind that the current comment thread is about the UK.

For the government. The stats are based on employer, so even if you switch roles or organization, you are still counted in the same “federal employment” bin.

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

#562

Post by bumby »

lotsofpulp wrote: post #555
bumby wrote: post #491

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Again, this assumes the main motivation is money. Ie if they could get a better paying job, they would. You can select for highly skilled people who also aren’t putting money as the top priority. The point I’m getting at is that pay can be a noisy proxy for skill and we should probably not assume they are tightly correlated in all domains. One person once said the people at the NSA are much more like Marines than Sil…

>this assumes the main motivation is money People evaluate pay to quality of life at work ratio, not just pay (although it is most commonly referred to as pay to avoid writing or saying all of that out). You cannot expect a person to come out of school at 30 to 35 years old with $300k+ of debt after working 80 hour weeks during their 20s and slaving away in residency and not expect a decent pay to quality of life at…

I agree and I think that supports the idea that salary alone is a bad metric for skills. Many people will take a lower pay to support a mission they are passionate about. To claim that makes them lower skilled or that they couldn’t get a higher paying job elsewhere is an overly simplified mental model. Sometimes the job itself is what leads to the higher quality of life.

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

#564

Post by [deleted] »

treis wrote: post #517
mediaman wrote: post #284

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Agreed. Many people I know who work in state government are always on or planning their next vacation, or in the middle of another home renovation, and lightly joke about their “work from home.” It’s just incredibly clear that there is no inventive to actually perform, and combined with environments such as WFH that need to be outcomes-based, it starts just looking like a fairytale life paid for by other people. This…

It's hard to explain to anyone who hasn't experienced it how absurd government work can be. I was briefly on the 2020 census project as a sub-sub-sub-contractor. The Census Bureau has access to IRS data and generated most statistics like unemployment rate for the government. So lots of PII and therefore strict background checks. All good except that they hired people before the checks were done. And the checks were s…

[deleted]

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

#565

Post by bumby »

whimsicalism wrote: post #467
bumby wrote: post #286

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Your stance seems to be at odds with the freedom of association protected by the US Constitution.

The protections offered to unions goes far beyond standard freedom of association. Generally I think that is okay, but not in the case of public unions.

I think you may be misunderstanding. The right to join a union is the right to association. Right to association is not something provided by a union. In other words, you have a right to collectively bargain for certain working conditions and that is guaranteed by the 1st amendment.

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

#566

Post by lotsofpulp »

bumby wrote: post #562
lotsofpulp wrote: post #555

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>this assumes the main motivation is money People evaluate pay to quality of life at work ratio, not just pay (although it is most commonly referred to as pay to avoid writing or saying all of that out). You cannot expect a person to come out of school at 30 to 35 years old with $300k+ of debt after working 80 hour weeks during their 20s and slaving away in residency and not expect a decent pay to quality of life at…

I agree and I think that supports the idea that salary alone is a bad metric for skills. Many people will take a lower pay to support a mission they are passionate about. To claim that makes them lower skilled or that they couldn’t get a higher paying job elsewhere is an overly simplified mental model. Sometimes the job itself is what leads to the higher quality of life.

No one is passionate about taking care of too many patients and making sure they document everything to the T to prioritize not being sued for millions of dollars.

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

#567

Post by sailfast »

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…

I would say that "Consulting" model as defined above is employed moreso (but not entirely) by Deloitte, but Accenture and Booz Allen have a higher percentage of on-site folks not at all engaged with internal IP building, sales, etc that amount to staff augmentation. As Booz Allen and Deloitte went after service contracts typically held by folks like Lockheed, GD, CSC, etc it was a race to the bottom for fees to grab as much land as possible, so there wasn't really any head room for people that could do both in the rate they pass through to the customer.

Furthermore, in the cleared space you're pretty much silo'd to places that grant clearances - so while you might build up some IP you can never actually leave that market because your credentials are too valuable.

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

#568

Post by dvdhnt »

tw04 wrote: post #229
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…

The ONLY time this occurs in the private sector is when corporate raiders are trying to extract every last penny from a business they plan on killing. Unsurprisingly this follows directly with project 2025s goal of dismantling the federal government and privatizing what departments aren’t filled with party loyalists at the expense of the average US citizen.

[flagged]

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

#569

Post by notahacker »

rayiner wrote: post #540
tw04 wrote: post #229

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The ONLY time this occurs in the private sector is when corporate raiders are trying to extract every last penny from a business they plan on killing. Unsurprisingly this follows directly with project 2025s goal of dismantling the federal government and privatizing what departments aren’t filled with party loyalists at the expense of the average US citizen.

[flagged]

tbf, unlike the US government employees selected on the basis of being sufficiently immune to reality to assert that Trump won the 2020 election in their "fidelity to the Dear Leader" tests, those who think that endorsement of such views is "deplorable" might have a point...

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

#570

Post by bumby »

lotsofpulp wrote: post #566
bumby wrote: post #562

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I agree and I think that supports the idea that salary alone is a bad metric for skills. Many people will take a lower pay to support a mission they are passionate about. To claim that makes them lower skilled or that they couldn’t get a higher paying job elsewhere is an overly simplified mental model. Sometimes the job itself is what leads to the higher quality of life.

No one is passionate about taking care of too many patients and making sure they document everything to the T to prioritize not being sued for millions of dollars.

This is a different argument. And there are plenty of people who put up with the bad parts of a job because the good parts are rewarding. Nobody should be so naive to think every job is all rainbows and puppy breath.

If your stance is that the healthcare system needs improvement, I’d agree. If your point is that the best doctors are the people who have money as their top priority, I’d disagree. I’d extend the latter to say, we may not get a better healthcare system by just paying people more. Throwing more money at a bad system tends to make a worse system.

Do you think we’d get better doctors if we could create a new system that lets them focus the majority of their effort on patient care, or if we kept the current system and just gave all physicians pay raises?

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