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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

#611

Post by sumedh »

sepalous wrote: post #98
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.

I agree. The government could be made hugely more efficient through the use of technology. However, the civil service simply doesn't pay enough to attract the talent it needs. Therefore, we are left with little option but to pay consultants more to deliver these contracts. The total cost to the tax payer is higher; it doesn't make sense! It is reductive to say that we just need to pay more, however. The civil service…

> The total cost to the tax payer is higher; it doesn't make sense!

Nobody cares because it's the taxpayers collectively losing money. The taxpayers are not going to protest about something they don't understand.

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

#612

Post by Izkata »

miltonlost wrote: post #316
stackedinserter wrote: post #250

Earlier quoted context omitted.

It's hard to track, because it's all nice websites with generic messages like "we make life better" and pictures with obligatory diversity faces. E.g. $4.5 billion here chemonics.com. Or $3 billion here devalt.org. Where did these money go? How can we measure the ROI? USAID is a corrupt wasteful sinkhole, good riddance to it.

USAID looking for an ROI???? THat's NOT the purpose of aiding other countries. You don't need to look for a return on an investment. USAid was feeding children in places. You're looking for an ROI on saving human lives. Learn empathy.

> aiding other countries.

> USAid

Incorrect. It stood for US Agency for International Development. There was some aid in there, but they also did things like international propaganda.

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

#613

Post by 8f2ab37a-ed6c »

JumpCrisscross wrote: post #490
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…

> consultancies in IT are just brokers This is also a lot of PE. College graduates want to live in a city and work for a “reputable” company. The founder of the Baton Rouge chemical plant, meanwhile, doesn’t recruit in New York and Los Angeles. So he hires Deloitte or gets taken over by Bain who hires some graduate and takes 40% of their pay in exchange for letting them commute from a city during the week and say the…

That made me chuckle, nicely written.

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

#614

Post by phonon »

airforce1 wrote: post #597
mint2 wrote: post #430

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> Similar to what Elon did with twitter Wait who thinks what Elon did with Twitter was a success? While it hasn’t fully collapsed like some predicted, it seems like a total unmitigated failure in any standard economic or business terms. It’s been a success only in terms of providing a bigger mouthpiece to Elon and those he favors, not a typical metric of corporate success. In that regards, yes what is happening at th…

Well, years later the website is still operational and the company still seems functional after Musk cut 80+% of the staff, which to me is pretty mind blowing. I'd call that pretty successful. If I, as the end user, can't tell the difference between pre-80% and post-80% cut twitter then what value was that 80% bringing to the organization, exactly?

Well, it's an incredibly unpleasant place to be, the curation is terrible, ads are dregs of the internet, and they no longer allow public access to the site or API in any meaningful way. Yay.

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

#615

Post by phonon »

selfhoster wrote: post #588
profsummergig wrote: post #572

I was sitting with a D.C. lobbyist at a function dinner. Lawyer at a prominent lobbying law firm. Random seat assignments. He gets a call on his cellphone. After the call he has a shit-eating grin on his face. Tells me Biden just signed student loan forgiveness. He had lobbied on behalf of the banks that had given the loans to the students (and students weren't paying them back). I asked him if it was fair on the wai…

"I asked him if it was fair on the waitress earning $13 per hour to subsidize the student loan of a Law school graduate. He changed the subject deftly." Excellent point.

How much in Federal income taxes does someone making $26,000 a year pay?

Single, no child, no subsidized savings...around $1,000.

1 Child...negative several thousands dollars.

That's assuming all income is being reported.

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

#616

Post by ksec »

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 dont know about US. But in the UK there is a different between Public Servants and Civil Servants. And to the public or at least the discussion of the topic they are largely one and the same. However jumping through these jobs would technically put them out of Government employment.

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

#617

Post by CityOfThrowaway »

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…

I was talking generally, not this specific set of cuts. From what I know (and what is generally accepted), there is an abundance of waste in government spending. I don't know anything about this specific Accenture contract, so can't say much about it. But I have enough close contact with government to know with absolute certainty that some amount of cleanup is long past due.

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

#618

Post by wat10000 »

bumby wrote: post #491
wat10000 wrote: post #488

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You also create a selection bias for people who are bad at what they do and can’t get a better paying job.

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…

It assumes that money is a motivation, which is generally true.

With low pay, you’ll get true believers and people who are bad at their work.

With high pay, you’ll get true believers, people who are bad at their work, and people who are good at their work. You can fill more positions without taking the bad ones.

As for what this says about society, I think all it says is that money can be exchanged for goods and services. If I’m selling ~50% of my waking hours, you’d damn well better believe I’m going to try to get a good price for it.

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

#619

Post by wat10000 »

bumby wrote: post #583
lotsofpulp wrote: post #581

Earlier quoted context omitted.

>Throwing more money at a bad system tends to make a worse system. There are most likely decreasing returns on both ends of the scale. >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? "A new system" is too nebulous, but step by step reform is the obvious way…

I agree with basically all of this. The one distinction I would make is that the pay reduction is real terms is across all kinds of domains so I don’t think it’s particularly unique of physicians, but part of a larger issue. Same with the cost of education/training etc. In other words, I think the healthcare issues you highlight may be emblematic of bigger systemic problems. With all that said, it’s still a different…

I do think substantially increasing Congress’s pay would result in better politicians. Dishonest people who are only in it for the money can find plenty of ways to profit from the office. As it stands, $174k is not a whole lot of money for a job that requires a ton of travel to the extent of basically requiring you to own two houses. This low pay means that non-wealthy members of Congress have a hard time of it. Non-wealthy people who would be good in Congress but don’t want to have that much hardship will bow out, or work around it with corruption. Low pay selects for rich and corrupt politicians. Someone who just wants to be in Congress to make a sweet $10 million in honest pay would be infinitely better than most of the people there right now.

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

#620

Post by bsder »

bhouston wrote: post #402
mellosouls wrote: post #283

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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 f…

> 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.

I am so tired of people who have "experience" repeating this talking point.

1) If an employee is union and being a freerider a manager has to document their failing before being able to fire them. And, yes, the union is going to defend them and make you do your job and put those documents in writing. The problem is that most managers don't want to put things in writing because, lo and behold, most of the time you wind up with written documentation that the manager is the problem instead of the union employee.

2) Union employees often hate freeriders more than managers do. Someone freeriding is making your own job far more miserable and if you can get rid of them, your own life is going to improve.

3) I can count the number of the freeriders I have encountered in union positions on one hand. I have lost count of the number of those people in non-union positions.

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