I have first hand knowledge with large consultant companies, they are largely sales teams with minimal IT knowledge. I had to help a one of their overseas "senior cloud professional" that had issues even understanding how to navigate the cloud UI.
Pentagon to terminate $5.1B in IT contracts with Accenture, Deloitte
661–670 of 684 posts
Re: Pentagon to terminate $5.1B in IT contracts with Accenture, Deloitte
#662Earlier quoted context omitted.
Senior devs are usually gs-15, step 10 which is about $195k in DC I don’t think it’s the money, I think it’s the mindset. There’s more project managers than actual hands on engineers.
Where have you seen gs-15 senior devs? That oddball org that turned into DOGE? Seniors developers top out GS-13 without supervisory responsibilities.
I've seen GS-12 and 13 advertised commonly. That's still good money and as much or more than I make.
Re: Pentagon to terminate $5.1B in IT contracts with Accenture, Deloitte
#663Earlier quoted context omitted.
GS pay scales can support senior devs just fine. Maybe not the $500k Googlers, but normal ones.
Yes, but sometimes you do actually want the $500k Googlers.
And you can have them. Once they're done making tons of money you have a chance to get the mission oriented ones.
Re: Pentagon to terminate $5.1B in IT contracts with Accenture, Deloitte
#664Earlier quoted context omitted.
"unhealthy" it's simple profiteering. In the UK that's got especially interesting. When more consultants started quitting these big firms to go independent (offering cheaper services to public sector and often better quality), these corporations lobbied for something called IR35 - basically means if company is worker owned, then it cannot make profit. Now big consultancies have very much a monopoly on making profit f…
That's nonsense. IR35 basically makes it more difficult for companies to treat an individual like an employee whilst paying them as a "consultant" (saving themselves various obligations and allowing the "consultant" much more flexibility in avoiding tax). Accenture actually used to hire a lot of people that way themselves... Individual consultants never were competing particularly closely with Accenture or Deloitte o…
You're missing how IR35 actually reshaped the ecosystem - not just in terms of tax compliance, but in terms of who's allowed to profit from delivering services.
It's not about preventing companies from treating people like employees. In fact, post-IR35, it enabled exactly that - but with fewer rights. Now, individuals can still be engaged for long-term, full-time work, as long as they go through an umbrella company and give up both autonomy and the ability to run a business. The result is employment in all but name, with none of the legal protections, and often less pay due to umbrella fees and unreimbursed business costs.
You're also wrong to suggest that independents weren't competing with the likes of Accenture or Deloitte. In practice, they absolutely were - especially in the public sector. Individual consultants and small firms were frequently:
- Delivering the same work at lower cost and higher quality
- Auditing or overseeing work delivered by big firms
- Winning smaller-scale, high-trust engagements directly with departments that didn't need an army of suits and a 200-page PowerPoint.
This did threaten the margin-heavy model of large consultancies, and they did lobby for IR35 and the subsequent reforms to de-risk their position. What IR35 achieved was to push out small, agile operators by making them legally and commercially "difficult" to work with - not because they were "tax dodging", but because they lacked the compliance resources and political access to fight back.
Meanwhile, large firms were exempt from these concerns. They can place workers with clients indefinitely without IR35 scrutiny, because the worker is not the owner of the delivery company. That's the loophole. The exact same working pattern is treated as fine if the profit flows to Deloitte, and suspicious if it flows to a one-person or small, workers owned limited company.
This isn't about "6-month gigs needing umbrellas" - it's about eliminating small, independent service providers from public sector procurement pipelines. It's about monopolising access to taxpayer money. And calling that "ensuring proper employment classification" is naive at best, and disingenuous at worst.
IR35 didn't restore fairness. It restructured the market to favour large corporations and removed one of the few viable routes working professionals had to operate independently and build something of their own.
Re: Pentagon to terminate $5.1B in IT contracts with Accenture, Deloitte
#665Earlier quoted context omitted.
But ... Trump will increase spending. Musk's financial future is dependent on increasing spending. They want to INCREASE the load on your paycheck, not decrease it.
Not really. Trump has cut the budget of NASA which is the part of the government that is the biggest customer of Spacex. They have also want to get rid of EV tax credits which are a huge source of income for Musk. Financially he would be much better off under a Harris administration. I think these are both extremely stupid policies, but its just not correct to say that the Trump administration is increasing spending…
The last data is from the previous month. Trump had already started "cutting costs", and requested a budget ... 8% higher than Biden's last budget. Same week data came out, showing Trump has overspent by about 10%. This combines to Trump outspending Biden by about 15% so far.
So Trump is increasing spending already. One might also comment this is hardly surprising since he did the same in his previous term, when he overspent by 4.6 trillion (meaning he enacted policies that would cost the US that amount over 10 years), and that was because congress stopped him from doing more damage. Trump is responsible for 20-25% of the entire US public debt in 2025 (Biden at most 5%, and a lot of that was Trump policy, mainly the tax "reduction")
Does this benefit Musk? Well, the pentagon announced they're paying about 6 billion to SpaceX, so in one announcement about 3% of their Trump-announced budget increase is going to Musk. They're also buying from Tesla, against just about everyone's advice, but are unwilling to say how much. They're also paying a lot for Starlink and even Xai, but also not known how much.
Re: Pentagon to terminate $5.1B in IT contracts with Accenture, Deloitte
#666they will probably announce a new $5B contract with Palantir next week
My thought exactly. I would bet good money on it. The administration that's making a big show of "cutting spending" is also raising the budget deficit by trillions.
Re: Pentagon to terminate $5.1B in IT contracts with Accenture, Deloitte
#667Earlier 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.
That was DOGE's job to tell us why and what, and they did none of that. Why is cutting millions to starving people in 3rd world countries a good thing? Why is cutting AIDs funding for similar situations a good thing? save millions now, pay billions later as these situations destabilize and make new terrorists and wars.
How many of these "millions" that are cut, is actual food for starving people in 3rd world? If it's that good, how much did they closer neighbors contribute?
Re: Pentagon to terminate $5.1B in IT contracts with Accenture, Deloitte
#668Earlier 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.
Oh interesting, look it's our empathy beacon right here.
Have you ever tried to figure out where did these money go? People like you keep parroting "feeding children", but when I read actual list of orgs funded by USAID, it's all nice words and stock pictures with very little actual data.
Yes, I look for metrics like for that N million dollars M thousand kids were fed. Without that it looks like corrupt sink hole, that it actually is.
Learn empathy, send me $100 monthly, I promise to spend them for good.
Re: Pentagon to terminate $5.1B in IT contracts with Accenture, Deloitte
#669Earlier quoted context omitted.
Why has nobody been prosecuted, then? Why was USAID's detailed budget website removed by the current administration? If crimes were being committed, why has there been no accountability? I keep hearing about all this corruption, but nobody seems to be in jail about it.
Accountability is shutting down the agency and shuttering the programs. They did that. The point of a slush fund is that the funds weren't allocated for specific programs by law, they were discretionary. So, while technically not illegal, they are frivolous and unethical. Not to mention, how would half the country and most of the world react if Trump's DOJ started arresting the people involved? They'd call him a tyra…
No, if a project does not work then you shut it down. If someone is stealing money then you prosecute them for theft. That's what the DOJ is for. There are plenty of instances of the DOJ prosecuting government employees for crimes.
So now, instead, we just have to take some rando's word for it that bad stuff was happening but nobody's going to jail over it because it was "technically not illegal"? And you call that accountability?
Re: Pentagon to terminate $5.1B in IT contracts with Accenture, Deloitte
#670Earlier 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…
> 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. This week, after witnessing the largest insider trading infraction in US history, many citizens barely noticed. I no longer believe citizens pay attention to news. They’re conditioned to feel outrage at wh…
I'm afraid that only the Sith deal in absolutes. Or something.
But yeah, I was thinking of that as I wrote it. I can confidently say that what I said still applies to my job.