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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

#621

Post by antasvara »

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…

I guess the problem I see is that I can think of a lot of careers (teachers, basically all of healthcare, certain kinds of engineers, etc.) where "below market pay" is translating to shortages and the need to push under or unqualified workers into roles they're not suited for.

This leads me to believe that the problem isn't necessarily finding some highly skilled people to accept below-market rates for mission-drive jobs. It's finding enough skilled people willing to accept the tradeoff.

Public schools haven't solved that problem. Healthcare hasn't seemed to solve that problem either. They're cautionary tales in that if you can't find enough people to accept the tradeoff, the remaining job openings are filled with significantly worse candidates because you pay below market rate.

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

#622

Post by pabs3 »

1024core wrote: post #162
aantix wrote: post #129

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Salary banding doesn’t attract the talent you need. Maybe, good enough? E.g. Who would contribute to open source, speak at conferences, write blog articles, go above and beyond to outwardly contribute, only to be grouped with others to make the same? Terrible deal.

TIL people contribute to Open Source for money. Just FYI: everyone who contributes to OSS makes the same!

There are lots of jobs in open source, some even in the HN hiring threads. Some more resources:

https://github.com/fossjobs/fossjobs/wiki/resources

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

#623

Post by ycombinatrix »

nonameiguess wrote: post #515
NegativeK wrote: post #433

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Pay is a common one from the employee's side. From the manager's side, it nearly takes an act of fucking god to open up a new position. Citizens pay attention to the number of employees, and they get mad about it. You really don't want to be the one to cause citizens to angrily call elected officials if you're in an appointed government position (i.e., an at-will employee.) I have an unsexy government job. I've seen…

I worked at Raytheon in geointelligence services a long time ago and saw this happen and it wasn't a particular mystery why. Raytheon had acquired a smaller company decades back that handled all the ground processing for US spy satellite collections. This was a small group of like 50 people who'd been working in an extremely niche domain that was also classified and they'd been doing it for 20+ years each. The govern…

>these are legitimately the only people in the world who can do what they do at the level they do it

Lol, is this a joke? Any good dev can do software development.

Most people aren't willing to work for peanuts, don't want to stop using drugs for a clearance, or are ideologically opposed to building weapons used to kill children or propagate genocide.

Sounds like Raytheon employees are all good on those fronts, rather than being good at their jobs. After all, if they were so effective, why wouldn't they work somewhere without all those caveats?

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

#624

Post by bitmasher9 »

aprilthird2021 wrote: post #306
bitmasher9 wrote: post #165

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I read the news to judge what the propagandist want me to know, not to actually learn things. I find skimming NYT’s and FOX’s headlines are perfectly satisfactory. If anything peaks my interest I do independent analysis, putting weight on primary sources. I often try to listen in on experts discussing the matter among themselves.

When do you have time to work?

It maybe consumes 1-3 hours a week to skim headlines. More research as needed, and mostly focused on matters I have a direct interest in (interest as in money on the line) so it counts as work.

It’s small potatoes for time, most people spend way more on television and social media.

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

#625

Post by anon84873628 »

FloorEgg wrote: post #594
immibis wrote: post #466

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I don't quite get the metaphor - you might have reversed it. The whole system is barrelling towards a cliff because of the current administration, who took away the guard rails that stopped the system barrelling towards a cliff, and then set course directly towards the cliff. The old system could well have been, like, scraping against the guard rails, flattening them gradually over time. The solution to that is not t…

In this video Warren Buffet and Charlie Munger talk about how the US system is heading towards a cliff, and the video was recorded in 2005. They articulate it well, although the video has a couple glitches in it. If you are actually interested in what's going on, I think what they are talking about is a big important piece of the puzzle. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YCgHj1_GBuY

20 years ago. We had the 2008 GFCI and COVID since then. I'll take whatever cliff they are referring to over the deliberate madness of Trump.

It's awfully convenient that "in economics you can say what's going to happen but not when." So you really don't know where the cliff is, how steep it is, what else is between us, etc etc. They even say at the end it's possible to outgrow the debt, but then just dismiss it.

I know you're trying to approach the whole thing in an abstract unemotional way and not defend Trump. But there is just no world in which what he's doing is somehow better in the long run... Well maybe being a pariah state solves the trade problem, but that's not "better" in my book.

The answer is for Congress to balance the budget and intelligently incentivize new industries. The fact that Congress has failed doesn't mean an incompetent strongman is the answer. The things he's doing to reorganize the executive and ship people to foreign gulags with no trial have nothing to do with improving the economy. And the legal argument he's using to claim tariff power is specious at best.

The structural reform we need in the US are things like: ranked choice voting, proportional representation, eliminate the electoral college and/or redraw state boundaries, and for the love of God get limitless corporate money out of politics.

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

#626

Post by fundad »

airforce1 wrote: post #595
fundad wrote: post #575

Earlier quoted context omitted.

And California is an incredibly successful economy and people dream of living there.

Then why is everyone fleeing to escape the high taxes and crime? California is losing house seats at the present. Also, I don't know if you can really credit the left's supermajority for the success of SV... CA's politics have pivoted over the years. Look at an election map of CA in 1980 and you'll see: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/1980_United_States_presidentia...

Everyone is fleeing? Sounds incorrect. There are people still living in California, many moving in and even more who dream of living in California.

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

#627

Post by Gud »

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…

Why should they come out of university with $300k+ in debt and do 80 hour weeks?! Sounds insane to me!

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

#628

Post by VirusNewbie »

fundad wrote: post #575
VirusNewbie wrote: post #545

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> The whole conservative ideology for the past 40 years has been to make the government inefficient so it can complain about government inefficiencies. People say things like this, but then have trouble explaining California, where the left has had a supermajority for almost as long.

And California is an incredibly successful economy and people dream of living there.

I live in California and I do think there's a lot going for it, but do you think the government is efficient? Are you really making that argument?

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

#629

Post by windex »

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…

> a woman who understood the system well enough to create her own firm,

Your friend could go through her firm then.

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

#630

Post by sfifs »

rrr_oh_man wrote: post #455
abakker wrote: post #436

Earlier quoted context omitted.

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'.

Not at all. I buy these services in a large Fortune 500. Consulting is the least used model for us.
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