[HN Gopher] Hertz paid Accenture $32M for a website that never w...
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Hertz paid Accenture $32M for a website that never went live
Author : sogen
Score : 224 points
Date : 2022-07-21 19:59 UTC (3 hours ago)
(HTM) web link (www.henricodolfing.com)
(TXT) w3m dump (www.henricodolfing.com)
| walrus01 wrote:
| this reminds me a bit of the canadian federal government and the
| phoenix payroll system.
|
| https://www.google.com/search?client=firefox-b-d&q=canada+go...
| bluetidepro wrote:
| Prob need to add the "2019" tag to this, for reference. But def a
| classic case, as others said.
| JohnGB wrote:
| I have a background in electricity regulation and policy
| analysis. A good friend (who knows nothing about energy
| regulation or science got assigned as a senior consultant in one
| of the big 5 consulting firms to advise a national energy
| producer on their technical and economic strategy for a new
| plant.
|
| So, she asked me if I could spare a few hours to sit with her and
| get her up to speed on electricity regulation and policy so that
| she would "know all about it" for the kickoff meeting in two days
| time...
| bloomingeek wrote:
| I'm smelling a potential situation where the website was never
| the goal, just siphon off money and use the website as a blind.
| Lower management no doubt guessed what was going on, but didn't
| want to risk losing their jobs.
| pembrook wrote:
| It's impossible to overstate how funny the shenanigans get when
| you combine a technologically incompetent legacy big Co. with one
| of these big professional services firms.
|
| The IT consulting firm will tell you they have experience with
| literally everything. They'll dig up a case study from one of
| their 400 offices somewhere, claiming to be experts on whatever
| the topic is. Meanwhile, in actuality, your project will be
| staffed with a team of 24 year old kids where this is their first
| assignment. And it doesn't matter anyways, because the people who
| worked on the original case study are long gone and would never
| communicate with other offices even if still around.
|
| Meanwhile at the big company, you'll have the opposite problem. A
| team of people with decades of experience, but who don't really
| know anything about _anything_ other than how to make their
| corporate machine not fire them. They'll think they know what
| they want, and will confidently tell you...but in actuality,
| these people have zero understanding of technology or even how
| their business runs. And who can blame them, they've spent a 30
| year career not doing or risking anything specifically, so its
| hard to learn how anything works with no feedback loop.
|
| It then becomes a delicate dance, can the consulting team learn
| how to do the thing they sold the client fast enough, before the
| client does their best to try to ruin the project out of sheer
| hubris and incompetence.
|
| This case is famous for being one where the dance went so bad it
| became a meme.
| sytelus wrote:
| The entire business idea of these "services" is to get cheap
| labor, pay them $30/hr and charge clients $300/hr. Why
| companies go for this? Because they can't build their own IT,
| they have failed all the times and their CTO loves golf.
| sorry_outta_gas wrote:
| Sometimes, I've worked at consulting shops that actually
| delivered quality though they were large-ish but not
| Accenture/IBM sized
| unixhero wrote:
| Hey! You would do great over at /r/consulting
|
| Come over, we have Thinkpads, whiteboards and friday beer.
| rozenmd wrote:
| 24 year olds? Since when are they sending the senior
| consultants out on engagements like this!
|
| I lasted not even 6 months working in professional services,
| really woke me up to what "prestigious careers" really are.
| ctrager wrote:
| LOL and true to my experience. In the 80's was a United
| Airlines employee on a project where Arthur Anderson (aka
| Accenture) was the consultant. The project included
| approximately 75 entry level AA programmers. My job was to
| write specs for them. The specs had to be 100% detailed,
| every "if", every "loop", except that I had to follow the AA
| methodology and write the entire program basically in
| flowchart form. Pencil and paper. The spec was a looseleaf
| notebook of diagrams. The spec would then be stored in a box,
| like, the kind you would use for moving, and the boxes put
| into a storage room. If I needed to change a spec, an AA
| employee would have to climb the piles of boxes to find my
| box, and then I would use actual scissors, actual glue, to
| make the change.
|
| It. Was. Insane.
| ctrager wrote:
| Another golden memory of that project was when I was given
| the assignment to meet with users - accounting people - on
| screens for approving tax payments. It was kinda a big deal
| for me at that stage in my career, to even talk to users.
| So, I meet with these guys and I introduce the topic, and
| they go, "What are you talking about? What do you mean
| 'approving'? They are taxes. We HAVE to pay them"
| simonh wrote:
| Scott Adam's has this covered.
|
| https://dilbert.com/strip/2000-01-01?utm_source=dilbert.com/.
| ..
| Nextgrid wrote:
| Is there good money to be made though? If idiots are happy to
| pay more for shit than they do for quality work I'll happily
| deliver them shit.
| hsbauauvhabzb wrote:
| If you deliver shit then they keep coming back to you to
| fix it. Pretty sure there are major consulting firms
| playing that game.
| pmcollins wrote:
| your sales game needs to be world class though. that's all
| that really matters.
| malux85 wrote:
| Did you read the title?
|
| When I was at a consulting firm in London that I wont name,
| I was charging them 700GBP a day, and they were charging
| the end client 1500GBP a day (I saw this on an internal
| presentation slide I was not supposed to see)
| NikolaNovak wrote:
| The difference between employee salary and effective
| hourly rate, and billable rate, is not usually
| particularly secret, and usually doesn't make any sense
| first time, or even 20th time one sees it. The billable
| rate is some outer space number with no meaningful
| connection to real world. If you stick long enough you'll
| realize that billable rate is not what consulting company
| charges for you. It's what they charge for you and the
| non billable boss, senior partner, salesperson, delivery
| excellence review people, Admin and hr support, half a
| dozen people who did the bids and proposal, legal, the
| first phase of the project company did as loss leader,
| and then for all those things multiplied by contracts not
| won. this too is not a particular secret either
| internally or to the client.
|
| If you go as a independent contractor, you can bill close
| to that rate yourself, but may find that you can't bill
| quite that rate as the mandatory middle vendors will take
| their obligatory cut, you need health insurance and your
| own expenses and any moment you're not working whether
| between contracts or vacation is lost money. Still makes
| sense for some people, less for others. Depends on your
| expertise, preferences, sales and networking skills, and
| how good is your accountant. Always better to build
| reputation and then become small consulting company
| yourself, billing billable rates and paying salary rates
| to others.
|
| (This is in the world of consulting. Math may be
| different in world of independent freelance technical
| developers)
| skeeter2020 wrote:
| If you've never worked for a big consulting shop it's hard
| to explain what it can be like. I BILLED 2,800 hours my
| first (and only) full year, and spent most weeks out of
| town. They love to take you out for dinner with your
| consulting coworkers while on engagement, but you quickly
| realize this is to (a) keep you onsight until 7 or 8pm, (b)
| prevent you from developing a life outside of the company,
| and (c) hey, maybe we should head back to the office after
| dinner for a little bit... It's fun for a while when you're
| young, single and stupid.
| throckmortra wrote:
| The only consulting firm I've ever heard spoken of somewhat
| favorably is McKinsey (and then only by ex-McKinsey people)
| EddySchauHai wrote:
| Perhaps, but their contributions to the opiate epidemic in
| the US makes me dislike the company - I know I'd never work
| there.
| cjdoc29 wrote:
| The kind of work that McKinsey does is much different to
| most of the work done by firms like Accenture. The latter
| may do some strategy-level work for managers / senior
| managers, but the largest portions of their revenue comes
| from work like BPO and technology implementations.
| conradfr wrote:
| Yeah well
| https://www.nytimes.com/2022/03/31/world/europe/macron-
| franc...
| laserlight wrote:
| Why Taxpayers Pay McKinsey $3M a Year for a Recent College
| Graduate Contractor:
|
| https://mattstoller.substack.com/p/why-taxpayers-pay-
| mckinse...
| nradov wrote:
| A lot of those ex-McKinsey people ended up at Enron, at
| least for a while...
|
| http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2002/07/22/the-talent-
| myth
| boomchinolo78 wrote:
| Even then, quote my father "I only hired them when I wanted
| outside support for an initiative or to sink someone
| else's". Meaning, it's just politics and they will never go
| against the executive that brings them in
| alexose wrote:
| I worked alongside one of these firms on a government contract.
| I was impressed by how _perfectly_ optimized they were to
| extract money. The team 's function was to report perfect KPIs
| at all costs. Managers spent virtually all their time bringing
| in more developers.
|
| Because "delivering a usable product" wasn't incentivized
| (specifically the 'usable' part, or what usability even meant),
| it was simply a race to generate specs, report on them with
| glowing optimism, and then stick as close to the letter of the
| specs as possible.
| zdragnar wrote:
| Actually having a usable product is missing from most
| government specs. Individual components get built by
| different teams, and nobody is responsible for making sure
| that they are built such that they work together.
|
| At least, that's the theory of why the insurance marketplace
| failed so spectacularly.
|
| Once you get to an organization of a certain size- private or
| public- the people with purchasing power are never the ones
| who need to use the service. As such, purchases are never
| made with the end users in mind. Instead, there'll be a list
| of checkboxes of things that sound nice, and if you're lucky,
| that list wasn't specially crafted to exclude everyone other
| than some Manager's buddy's business.
| UltimateFloofy wrote:
| I was being billed at > $300/hr when I first got out of school
| at 21 as consultant. 24 would make someone a senior consultant!
| lowercased wrote:
| My first 'agency' gig was late 90s - I was making $21/hr, and
| being billed out at .. $175/hr I think. Varied a bit, but
| most billing was $150-$180 when I started, and I think most
| new projects were $180-$200/hr by the time I left (20 months
| later)
|
| 1998 - walking around you saw dozens of copies of "ASP for
| Dummies" on various desks.
|
| I started at $21/hr, then found out later some other folks
| hired _after_ me came in even a bit less ($19?! - but hey,
| you get 'benefits' too!). They'd hired a 'real' HR person
| right after hiring me, and they clamped down a bit more. My
| interview was one of the last ones where there was no HR
| screening, and I was just talking to the top dev/eng folks
| directly.
| Nextgrid wrote:
| How much of that $$$ did you get to keep?
| skeeter2020 wrote:
| I was billed out at around $300 an hour and paid salary of
| 75K plus porfit sharing (sometimes) and bonus based on
| billability
| aditya wrote:
| 1/10th usually
| micromacrofoot wrote:
| My first job billed my time at $200/hr and my salary was
| $28k. I was 21 and they would literally put me on projects
| solo. Once a client was on retainer the execs disappeared and
| let fresh college grads do the work, it's a total scam.
|
| I tried another agency job 2 years later and it was exactly
| the same. Changed again a year later, and the same story. Had
| enough experience to quit and go freelance at that point.
| icedchai wrote:
| I worked at a defense contractor. They'd pay me like $45/hr
| and bill me out at like $175 or something. This was the early
| 2000's after the dot-com crash. When I quit, they offered me
| like an instant 20% raise despite the fact they were giving 3
| or 4% raises for years. Truly pathetic.
| walrus01 wrote:
| have seen it described in telecom industry as "dinosaurs
| mating"
| noSyncCloud wrote:
| Literally perfect analogy, going to remember this.
| pinot wrote:
| Yeah all that is true.. but what is even worse is the
| relationship between "account execs" and "Decision makers".
| Only reason they keep getting the work are those to players.
| dakial1 wrote:
| You said it perfectly.
|
| When I read "Agile Model" I could already see it, Accenture
| signing a Time & Materials contract, giving no shit about the
| badly detailed scope on the clients side (after all this means
| more hours), and some bad PMing on both sides. I bet the
| responsive detail was not clearly stated on the scope,
| Accenture noticed it but let it pass since it is T&M...
|
| I'm an ex-Accenture (and also ex-IBM iX, that fixed Hertz site
| in the end) and to be fair this is not a widespread behavior on
| those companies, it really depends on who is the Senior
| leadership for those clients and areas are. I've seen some good
| and caring ones on both companies but I've also seem some
| terrible used car salesmen whose dominance in the higher
| executive levels (since they bring money) made me decide to
| switch from both.
| throwawaylinux wrote:
| > It then becomes a delicate dance, can the consulting team
| learn how to do the thing they sold the client fast enough,
|
| Can they find a loophole in a document somewhere or a mistake
| in some email that they can use to claim what they sold the
| client is out of scope, you mean.
| TrackerFF wrote:
| Learning by doing, while billing your clients $xxx/hr
|
| The consultant way.
| LightG wrote:
| Pfft, my recent experience has been "copying while billing
| your clients".
|
| Just had a consultant who literally got me to womp up a
| summary of everything going on (which was pre-existing
| analysis). They then added it to a PDF with some titles and a
| bit of fancy colour-shading, and BANG. PSXbillable hours and
| some expenses to boot. Honestly, the only "added value" they
| brought was to add on a cumulative growth percentage they
| obviously pulled out of their ...
|
| Joke.
|
| But I place the blame with the CEO, not the consultant.
| Consultants gonna "consult".
| pcurve wrote:
| haha oh boy, I have a similar story to tell about $!0mm IT
| project we (not me) gave to M______y.
|
| Never again.
| MattGaiser wrote:
| Do Accenture and IBM have any truly satisfied clients? Anyone
| have a positive story (more than acceptable) with one of the
| professional services firms?
| 88913527 wrote:
| You have to wonder what proportion of GDP is money sloshing
| around like this but not providing any real value. The
| consultants got their paychecks and spent their money in the real
| economy, but there seems to be a great deal of waste in the B2B
| space.
| louwrentius wrote:
| You should read Bullshit Jobs by David Graeber if you haven't
| already.
| lxe wrote:
| I'd wager only 5-10% of all money is actually used in an
| exchange for real value. Everything else is just rotating
| through the bureaucrats.
| raverbashing wrote:
| I ask myself the same question
| greenpeas wrote:
| A lot of resources are being "wasted" by everyone all the time.
| Think about the gym memberships and exercise equipment that
| people buy and never use. Or online courses and books that
| don't get consumed. Or clothes and shoes that are never worn,
| or food that gets thrown out. There's "waste" everywhere, but
| only big businesses can afford to lose this much at once, so
| that catches our attention. Fortunately, there's usually a
| selection process that makes sure those businesses don't live
| too long.
|
| edit: how many discontinued google products are there? They're
| got to be worth tens of billions in developer costs and perhaps
| more in opportunity costs.
| gumby wrote:
| Lovely: a form of Bastiat's Broken Windows fallacy. I think
| you're on to a great insight!
| thechao wrote:
| I have this theory that B2B is actually _most_ of the economy;
| and, that, somehow, real people are only ancillary to that.
| Like a patina if human customers over a huge mound of B2B ...
| motion.
| dreig wrote:
| But how can that be? At the end of the day some consumer must
| foot the bill and cover all the additional costs of B2B
| services. Ultimately businesses are only comfortable paying
| others businesses because they found a way to make money
| (i.e. sell to customers, somewhere down the line)
| tclancy wrote:
| Valuations stopped working on reality some time ago.
| kwere wrote:
| governement in most economies es even more Gargantuous. just
| for US, 37% on average (since 1970s) of gdp is governemt
| spending (revenue+debt). here an historical gov on gdp table:
|
| []https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_countries_by_governme
| n...
| lxe wrote:
| Another web agency failure post on HN today. Interesting trend!
| pootpucker wrote:
| bob1029 wrote:
| > Accenture and Hertz engage in phase 1 of the project, producing
| a "solution blueprint" that describes the functionality, business
| processes, technology, and security aspects of the envisioned
| solution. Fees paid to Accenture for this phase total $7M.
|
| 7 million dollars for requirements gathering?
|
| Hertz should have known better. I'd pay just to see these
| contracts for entertainment value.
| antisthenes wrote:
| Entirely feasible if there are a multitude of teams at Hertz
| with hands in the cookie jar.
|
| Trying to coordinate between 10+ managers of varying seniority
| (in a legacy company who's struggling with tech) and prevent
| scope creep at the same time is an absolute nightmare scenario.
|
| I'd hate to be the Business Analyst in charge of that.
| postmeta wrote:
| 32mil? thats chump change, Oregon paid Oracle 240mil for an
| obamacare site that was never delivered
|
| https://www.statesmanjournal.com/story/news/politics/2016/09...
| julianlam wrote:
| Boy, I bet the founder of TinyPilot doesn't feel so bad anymore.
| bamboozled wrote:
| When I read this I thought immediately, "Why is this even news ?
| Of course this happened?"
| curiousllama wrote:
| Tech consulting, of the type Accenture does, is so weird. I once
| got staffed on a multimillion dollar project to "predict general
| macroeconomic activity."
|
| The story described in this article just sounds so classic. I'm
| consistently surprised that more consultants don't get sued.
| AtlasBarfed wrote:
| Accenture outsourced the IT depts of major companies in the
| 90s, as such they are embedded in their non IT business units
| and can intercept sales of one off projects.
|
| Those companies who thought IT was an annoying cost with nerdy
| ugly employees rather than the core efficiency driver of their
| business then became utterly dependent on Accenture and at best
| could swap them for either equivalent junk from IBM or Deloitte
| or went further down the toilet with TCS.
|
| What's notable is the lawsuit, Accenture will usually eat money
| for a failed project in hopes of keeping Future project jectd
| and general reputation.
|
| Hertz must be terminating the overall relationship.
| tootie wrote:
| My only interaction with Accenture was years ago. They air-
| dropped like 100 recent grads and few account managers to build
| a very complex system like 1000 monkeys at 1000 typewriters.
| And I know for a fact they used underhanded techniques to
| maintain their foothold at the expense of the quality of the
| product.
| hammock wrote:
| What kind of underhanded techniques?
| tootie wrote:
| There was a production issue that was somewhere between the
| system they built and the one I was working on. A "mole" on
| their team who preferred the company of our team relayed to
| us that the Accenture manager told their team not to help
| debug the issue and to let us flounder so the project
| sponsors would think they needed them.
|
| Mind you, this was over ten years ago.
| AtlasBarfed wrote:
| I'd be fascinated to know if they still do this. That was the
| Accenture model in the 80s and 90s, but then they went hard
| for outsourcing.
|
| Maybe TCS outbid them on the low end and they're pivoting
| back to inshore
| 1123581321 wrote:
| A client paid me $7,500 for a site in 2011, approved the final
| version, but never got around to giving me the hosting
| information. It never went live. The screenshots were fine
| portfolio pieces and I spent their money, but I'm still annoyed
| by that.
| codegeek wrote:
| Don't feel bad. I paid a consultant over $10,000 a year ago and
| didn't go live with their code. The reason was not them, it was
| me. I did something without asking our dev team and it was a
| bad idea. By the time I got to my senses, I had spent over 10K.
| The consultant was great though. As founders, we sometimes do
| shitty and idiotic things.
| devmor wrote:
| I had a similar experience but with a contract 10x that amount.
| It was baffling.
| awinter-py wrote:
| > According to a presentation at a MuleSoft conference in 2018
| they had at the time around 1,800 IT systems, 6 database vendors,
| and 30 rental processing systems
|
| '30 rental processing systems' interesting opportunity. the
| airbnb / squarespace rental ecosystem has a bunch of standards
| for syncing bookings, but I think they mostly amount to
| exchanging ical files. would be neat to develop a modern open
| protocol for inventory + then develop a hosting business around
| it -- applications in cars, retail (like that 'pointy' company
| google bought), sharing economy
|
| like _IBM_ is doing this now, zero chance their system is usable
| https://www.ibm.com/docs/en/inventory-visibility?topic=data-...
|
| or this mckinsey whitepaper that's clearly not a thing you can
| use without a bespoke contract
| https://www.mckinsey.com/~/media/McKinsey/Industries/Retail/...
| blantonl wrote:
| What you describe is basically open source ERP exchange
| protocols, which will never happen, as enterprise ERP software
| is designed to lock companies in for _generations_ of
| maintenance contracts.
|
| We were supposed to get all this with the promise of SOA, SOAP,
| data routers etc, but that never really happened outside of the
| enterprise.
| wgx wrote:
| The UK's NHS can top that, with the infamous Capita contract that
| cost billions and delivered nothing.
| smsm42 wrote:
| One expects this kind of behavior from the government, but
| business setting huge pile of cash on fire still attracts
| attention.
| tebbers wrote:
| The PS10bn one under Tony Blair?
| 0xCAP wrote:
| I've never witnessed a single skilled professional working at
| Accenture in 10+ years of IT career. Period.
| tims33 wrote:
| The ultimate measure of a tech systems integrator is how many
| CIOs were fired as a result of hiring your firm.
| nebqr wrote:
| "Hertz gets Hertz treatment from Web Agency"
| Benlights wrote:
| I've been hearing about this lawsuit for years now, but I've
| never seen what the ruling was.
| a-dub wrote:
| it kinda reminds me of the whole aca website debacle. in both
| cases, they tried to use one of these large, general outsourcing
| firms for technology work and in both cases it ended up with
| nobody on either side knowing what they were doing.
|
| if there's a lesson, i'm pretty sure it's "if you choose to
| outsource something because it's sufficiently special that you
| don't feel comfortable doing it, make sure you outsource it to
| someone who specializes in what you need done."
| cheriot wrote:
| At what point will these lauded MBA programs teach people how to
| hire and manage consultants? This is a predictable failure mode.
| halfmatthalfcat wrote:
| tldr: I was on the Accenture Frontend team for Hertz - it was a
| clusterfuck.
|
| I think it's finally ok for me to give some perspective to this -
| It's been 5 years so I'm sure any NDA has expired by now.
|
| I was part of the on-shore Accenture frontend team for the Hertz
| project and a lead to boot. A couple of my previous coworkers on
| the Hertz project lurk HN as well and we've wanted to always
| portray what a shitshow this project was.
|
| Speaking for the Accenture side - it was doomed to fail. The
| projected started with 4 lead on-shore frontend engineers and one
| architect, all of whom had never shipped a large-scale Angular 2
| project. Our architect (a self-proclaimed Ember expert) had
| trouble grasping the basics of Angular so the four leads had to
| band together and lead the architecture. Our project manager was
| so busy managing up that we were left to fend for ourselves.
|
| Accenture had enlisted around 25 developers from IDC or the India
| Delivery Center with one architect on their end to co-lead
| architecture. Originally it was suppose to be one on-shore lead
| to 5 offshore developers. That went off the rails pretty quickly
| to which Accenture leadership decided to let IDC loose and do
| their own thing.
|
| To highlight how poorly this was planned: Accenture promised an
| entire digital "transformation" in 8 months. The first "epic"
| (Accenture tried to shoehorn Agile into a Time and Materials
| project) was the happy path checkout flow and we had one month to
| do it. That failed miserably as we barely had the foundation of
| the app built.
|
| That first epic took around six months to complete. At that
| point, IDC was spent hacking together the entire frontend while
| the on-shore devs were left unhacking hacks.
|
| Speaking for the backend - it was equally a shitshow. The infra
| team were relatively new to Docker Data Center and the backend
| architect was trying to bootstrap a slew of Spring micro-services
| but was resource strapped. They had trouble getting access to
| Hertz systems in order to unarchitect to rearchitect.
|
| Accenture had the talent (for the most part) to pull something
| like this off but failed absolutely miserably at planning the
| project. They did the exact opposite of underpromise,
| overdeliver. That's Accenture's informal motto though: "land and
| expand".
|
| Hertz was not innocent at all in this though. They were
| completely oblivious throughout the entire process and were
| willfully lead on by Accenture throughout the entire process.
|
| Suffice to say, we overran the 8 month timeline until Accenture
| brought a ton of resources around the year mark to swarm the
| project to completion but by that point, there was so much cruft
| and tech debt it was near impossible to salvage.
|
| It was easily the most stressful year of my life and I'm glad I
| finally get to vent on HN about it but goddamn these are two
| terrible companies.
| durnygbur wrote:
| lol Accenture, could go with PwC they would do the same but on
| Azure.
| OliverJones wrote:
| Hey, I gotta idea. The ocean covers up stuff we want to see. So,
| let's just boil off the ocean.
|
| Why, oh why, doesn't high-end project management training include
| case studies of mission-critical systems in large long-lived
| organizations? Large === hundreds of thousands of people
| affected. Long-lived === centuries. I'm thinking of, for example,
| the signaling systems in the New York City subways. You get the
| idea.
|
| You can't just delete and replace a big system like that like you
| can a malfunctioning virtual machine at a cloud provider. You
| have to work with what you have. And, a decade out, you'll still
| have to work with what you had back then, just less of it.
|
| Any gang of $200/hr fresh-out-of-school devs can do a greenfield
| system. But maintenance is hard. Upgrading existing business
| processes without disrupting the business is hard.
|
| In health care, EPIC seems be able (mostly) to do that.
| Peoplesoft. We don't hear from the govt much, but Social Security
| seems to be doing it.
|
| What track record of successful business process upgrades do the
| big-four contractors have? That would be the question to ask.
| doctor_eval wrote:
| I worked as a vendor in a large telco project run by Accenture.
| In the middle of the project they "changed methodologies" - at
| the customer's expense. Despite (IMO) selecting the right
| methodology up front being the whole point of hiring a company
| like Accenture, the managers at the telco were totally fine with
| this change - they were all working their asses off to ensure
| they got a gig at Accenture once the project was complete, they
| didn't care about the telco at all.
|
| The manager I worked under was absolutely complicit in this
| process of ripping off the customer. And while he was one of the
| worst managers I've ever worked with, he was very good at his
| main job, which - as I came to understand - was to get a job at
| Accenture.
| danny_taco wrote:
| I was at Accenture Digital, now rebranded as Accenture Song, when
| Hertz was a client in our office. Most projects had the same
| issues.
|
| I was hired as a developer to work on the front-end of a very
| ambitious app for one of the biggest oil companies in the world.
| One year later we delivered a crappy single page app, a
| relational database and some data pipelines, and in exchange we
| billed them no less than 20 million.
|
| I think I mentally checked out at 6 months in when I realized I
| couldn't fight against the current. Management was incompetent,
| half of my team mates had no experience or ability to work as
| software developers, and all the individual contributors were the
| ones with the pressure to deliver and work on weekends. Yeah, I'm
| not going to work extra hours because you don't know how to say
| no when the client tells you they want this extra feature and
| they also want to cut down the timeline.
|
| The only reason these companies are successful is that the top
| execs are friends with the other execs at fortune 500 companies
| so they mostly figure out a way to spin it as a success so
| everyone gets their bonuses even if no value was created.
| pvarangot wrote:
| > The only reason these companies are successful is that the
| top execs are friends with the other execs at fortune 500
| companies so they mostly figure out a way to spin it as a
| success so everyone gets their bonuses even if no value was
| created.
|
| It's also usually that the big companies are so incompetent
| that paying 20 million dollars for nothing is still cheaper
| than hiring their own people to do it in house and ending up
| paying 40 million dollar for a team that will actually break
| stuff down and make everything worse.
| captaincaveman wrote:
| It's not so much that their own people, i.e. the actual doers
| are incompetent, its thats the management structure is, so
| they are set up for failure. And yes it might take longer,
| and cost more, as they need to hire etc opex, get more
| scrutiny, can't try and fix the problem by throwing more devs
| at it at a drop of a hat etc.
| popotamonga wrote:
| I worked for companies like these. They Used every trick on the
| book to make the client dependent on them on maintenance.
| Including making it deliberatly slow to increase speed over the
| years.
| Hasz wrote:
| The big4 (D, EY, Accenture, EY) are the absolute last people I
| would call for any tech project, ever. I worked in one (very
| briefly) and could not understand why anyone with a modicum of
| technical experience would pick them for technical work.
|
| They can do good work for some things, like regulation, audit,
| tax, etc -- there's a decent chance that whoever wrote the
| regulation you have to comply with works for one of the big4,
| which is quite advantageous.
|
| However, for a technical project, complete boondoggle.
| api wrote:
| Sounds about right. I have never ever seen a web consulting group
| deliver anything that isn't complete trash, late, never, or some
| combination thereof.
|
| Individual consultants can be okay. Consulting firms tend to be
| complete trash and make a living off the technically ignorant.
| Seems to be worse in web than other areas.
| jwithington wrote:
| Found the web agency that did that dudes e-commerce website lol
| linuxhansl wrote:
| On some level it serves them right hiring Accenture for that.
|
| I used to read https://thedailywtf.com/ and it was full of
| stories of consultancy project that failed in the most horrible
| and insane ways.
| naet wrote:
| "Content Management - Adobe Experience Manager (AEM) was the tool
| of choice to update and revise the content that appears on the
| website."
|
| If you want to blow a massive development budget AEM is a great
| choice; otherwise I'd advise you to pick a different content
| system.
|
| This decision alone probably sunk multiple millions of dollars.
|
| The platform license alone for their operating scale was probably
| a half million or a million. What you get with that license is...
| the world's most complex and difficult content management system,
| that you now have to develop your whole platform around. Since
| it's so difficult to learn and work with you basically need a
| full time AEM specialist team, which again blows your budget up
| potentially in the range of millions of dollars, and then
| continues to burn strong every time you need any kind of update.
| osrec wrote:
| Why anyone would pick that over a bunch of very mature open
| source offerings (with much larger developer communities) is
| beyond me.
| steele wrote:
| Analyst reports, compelling demos at conferences, ecosystem
| of professional services partners with a relationship with
| the software vendor (implied promise of escalation of
| issues), 24x7x365 SLAs, competitor success stories using the
| same technology, existing training materials along with
| distant promise of developing in-house expertise by working
| along-side system integrators.
| adrr wrote:
| Would like to know what open source CMS offering has a very
| mature offering? Wordpress is fine for a blog/news site.
| crgwbr wrote:
| Django wagtail is pretty great.
| soperj wrote:
| Liferay?
| hammock wrote:
| Examples?
| mgbmtl wrote:
| Just curious, which OSS CMS would you recommend for that kind
| of site?
|
| I work with Drupal and WordPress, but would not recommend
| them for user data or transactional data (although in my
| case, we bridge Drupal/WordPress with CiviCRM, and that works
| relatively well).
| crate_barre wrote:
| naet wrote:
| There is a certain class of high scale enterprise client that
| always voices strong prefernce for AEM. I think it might be
| because AEM at one point was ahead of their competitors and
| so a lot of the existing enterprise level companies use it in
| production and have experience on it? Or maybe they think
| everyone at that operating scale is using it, and so it must
| be the best choice... truth is the development experience is
| painful and it usually isn't the best tool.
|
| My agency had a contract to make a site for an Amazon event.
| They specified that we had to use AEM, probably because
| Amazon uses AEM on some of their other properties, but it was
| not a good fit for quickly standing up a limited scope event
| site.
| smetj wrote:
| Another variation on "Nobody ever got fired for buying
| ${big_corp}"
| tootie wrote:
| I've done so many AEM sites for clients with more money than
| sense. I had to quit the agency business to get away from it.
| It's absolutely sensible for a big company with complex
| requirements to buy an off-the-shelf enterprise software
| package even at a substantial price tag, it's just that AEM
| absolutely sucks at almost everything. They sell it with the
| stupid Adobe Marketing Cloud saying you'll get CMS, analytics,
| A/B testing, ad targeting, yadda yadda in one giant package.
| Only they're all just a mishmash of acquisitions that don't
| integrate well at all and none of them are close to the best
| products for their task. They made for a very compelling sales
| pitch back in like 2013 when options were more limited and
| enterprise CMS was a busy space, but no one should be fooled by
| this in the 2020s.
|
| Also, I can't prove this, but I am highly suspicious that Adobe
| and their integrators cook up a lot of these deals and get
| service firms like Accenture to recommend their products for a
| kickback. I've been stared at by their sales team asking me to
| help sell their products and refused. Not ever offered anything
| under the table but I felt like I was getting winked at.
| chevman wrote:
| Yes, a lot of "strategic partnerships", "joint ventures" and
| the like.
|
| Just wait until your BigCo is buying stuff from the
| consultants/SIs and Adobe/SFDC/IBM/etc and they are all YOUR
| CLIENTS as well buying tons of services from your company in
| a totally different market.
|
| "Balance of trade" is the term you'll soon learn about in
| deal negotiations :)
| blantonl wrote:
| IBM WebSphere enters the chat...
| gumby wrote:
| > If you want to blow a massive development budget AEM is a
| great choice; otherwise I'd advise you to pick a different
| content system.
|
| It's tailor made for this. Management will always sign off
| because they've heard of Adobe.
| wmeredith wrote:
| As someone who holds a certification as an AEM Business
| Solutions Specialist (possibly lapsed by now) I have to
| agree. It's hot garbage.
| DaiPlusPlus wrote:
| Educate me: What does AEM do that a tweaked WordPress or
| Drupal (or even SharePoint Site Template) doesn't?
| gumby wrote:
| The modern version of "Nobody got fired for buying IBM"
| is "nobody got fired by using a brand name the boss
| recognizes". That is what AEM does that Drupal does not.
|
| The boss doesn't know what content management even is,
| but they have heard of Photoshop and Acrobat so AEM must
| be good.
| matsemann wrote:
| The consultancy I worked for didn't sell or promote that kind
| of tech, but I still got exposed to it at various clients.
| Seems like a top-down approach, some upper manager saw the cool
| tool promoted by someone and bought it, then demanding the devs
| use it no matter the fit.
|
| Instead of these heavy systems, my favorite has been
| https://www.sanity.io/ . Headless is the way to go, when your
| anyways building a custom frontend.
| cyberpunk wrote:
| Seen loads of strapi around too; has its warts but it's easy
| enough for frontend folks to manage. :)
| tmp_anon_22 wrote:
| > upper manager saw the cool tool promoted by someone and
| bought it
|
| And closing that deal and having their reports implement the
| roll-out was milked for an entire quarters worth of
| performance metrics for that manager's brag-sheet.
| imilk wrote:
| If you're talking about Sanity, feel like I should mention
| Directus. Been wonderful for a few projects and completely
| open source.
| [deleted]
| c3534l wrote:
| I don't understand why anyone would think $32 million is a
| reasonable price point for a car rental site to begin with.
| treis wrote:
| It's not just a website. They were merging at least three
| different enterprise level backend plus deploying the front end
| to thousands of locations. That's a gigantic effort.
| jazzyjackson wrote:
| it's psychological but maybe also pragmatic
|
| if your billion dollar business relies on the web site working
| well, you wouldn't think of trusting it to a small freelancer
| that quotes you 50k or whatever, it's almost like they start
| with a budget in mind (7 digits ought to do it) and then find
| someone who will take that much money
|
| disclaimer: I have no experience here but I think this lecture
| on pricing design touches on it, that big corps aren't going to
| touch you if you're not charging them outrageous fees
|
| [0] https://youtu.be/RKXZ7t_RiOE
| coldcode wrote:
| Seen this way too many times to recount in a comment. Stupid
| company hires stupid company to do massive project, neither side
| is competent to do anything but waste/collect money.
|
| I talked once with an airline who had outsourced their entire dev
| and dev management to some foreign companies; they wanted to hire
| a mobile dev to go to where the team was and try to figure out
| why nothing was getting done, as they had no in house knowledge
| about mobile at all. I said hell no. Nothing ever shipped that I
| saw and I think they gave up and went back to in house again
| eventually. Just because you are a big company doesn't mean you
| have a clue.
| stuff4ben wrote:
| Out of curiousity, what would the HN crowd recommend for the tech
| stack for a project like this? They had Angular, Mulesoft, and
| some other cruft I'm sure thrown in. What
| technology/languages/frameworks would work well enough to support
| Hertz and their subsidiaries for now and into the future?
|
| Here's what I'd choose as someone who hasn't done something like
| this in his 25 year career: Some front-end framework (is React
| still relevant?), Java/SpringBoot, Kubernetes/KNative, some mesh,
| some back-end mainframe integration with their legacy systems...
| jamesvnz wrote:
| Angular was a reasonable choice - it's well suited to
| "enterprise" web applications as it has standard ways of doing
| things the Angular way in contrast to React which has 3 - 5
| options for different things. Certainly back when it was
| chosen, there's no issue in this choice.
|
| Mulesoft, personally hate it - but it's definitely an option if
| you're trying to abstract out a whole bunch of legacy systems
| into clean APIs. Personally, I'd probably create some
| lightweight integration components in custom code (whatever
| language you like) deployed in containers on some scalable
| cloud platform over buying a chunk of enterprise middleware and
| trying to find the skilled resource to configure it. But, I
| don't think Mulesoft was a death knell here - merely a bit of a
| money pit. Same thing for AEM.
|
| Overall, it doesn't look like they were choosing unreasonable
| tools to do the various things they wanted. e.g. they weren't
| trying to use Salesforce as a transactional database platform.
|
| You could definitely pick a better stack, largely from open
| source, and deploy to the hyper-scale cloud provider of your
| choice - but I don't think the tech stack that's what screwed
| this project up overall.
| orf wrote:
| > In its revised suit, Hertz states that Accenture represented
| that they had "the best talent in the world"
|
| > Hertz claims that they were far from experts in these
| technologies and that Accenture was deceptive in their marketing
| claims.
|
| Colour me surprised.
|
| > Accenture also failed to test the software, Hertz claims, and
| when it did do tests "they were seriously inadequate, to the
| point of being misleading." It didn't do real-world testing,
| we're told, and it didn't do error handling.
|
| > Accenture's developers also misrepresented the extent of their
| testing of the code by commenting out portions of the code, so
| the code appeared to be working.
|
| > Despite having specifically requested that the consultants
| provide a style guide in an interactive and updateable format --
| rather than a PDF -- Accenture kept providing the guide in PDF
| format only
|
| So, like always, they sold a fantasy to a bunch of executives
| asleep at the wheel who lacked even the most basic technical
| skills needed to see that it was a fantasy, then farmed the work
| out to the cheapst developers possible and pocketed the
| difference.
| lowercased wrote:
| > bunch of executives asleep at the wheel who lacked even the
| most basic technical skills needed to see that it was a
| fantasy...
|
| At _some_ point, someone with technical acumen took stock of
| the situation and said "this is garbage". Why does this step
| always come last?
|
| WTF. "They said they were the best, but they lied!" I _bet_ you
| as Hertz had _some_ competent technical folks who could have
| vetted them. You either have them inhouse (but you 've
| overlooked them for years) or you engage an inspector/reviewer
| to vet the claims or review previous work. I buy a car, I can
| get a private inspection done. I buy a house, I get a house
| inspector to verify the claims.
| vsareto wrote:
| The more stories I hear about this, the more I'm inclined to be
| an executive-asleep-at-the-wheel because apparently they get
| paid a lot, do a terrible job, and nothing happens to them.
| noSyncCloud wrote:
| > nothing happens to them.
|
| Not true! They get multi-million dollar golden parachutes
| when they decide they're tired of playing business and would
| rather play golf.
| mrtweetyhack wrote:
| rolandog wrote:
| I learned how to do proper project management by doing everything
| wrong at an internship during my college years.
|
| The main stakeholder was always busy and in meetings, so I would
| mostly clock-in and clock-out after having waited outside the
| meeting room for hours while coding on what we had agreed upon on
| a very hurried 15 minute meeting months ago.
|
| After 6 months of not having meetings, and having no access to
| any data, specifications, or feedback, the end result was a
| glorified Lorem Ipsum placeholder of a forum with a chat applet
| on the sidebar that I'm relieved didn't ever go live.
| jsiaajdsdaa wrote:
| For 1% of the cost they could have paid me :)
| eckesicle wrote:
| I've never heard of a truly successful project by these large
| scale consulting firms.
|
| Even the so called success stories seem ... mediocre at best.
|
| Has anyone been part of such a project at a firm like that?
| hcurtiss wrote:
| I'd say recreation.gov by Booz Allen Hamilton is pretty good.
| Some of the policies are disputed (e.g., racing for camp
| sites), but the technology works very well.
| johnwheeler wrote:
| Ouch. That Hertz!
| commandlinefan wrote:
| I think it mega Hertz.
| rich_sasha wrote:
| My main question is: who hires Accenture for this kind of job,
| for no less than $32m??? They would be my last point of call,
| literally after my mum, and maybe even after my dog. At least
| he's cheap.
| orangepurple wrote:
| The executive that hired Accenture paid them with OPM
| (pronounced "opium", known as "other people's money").
| Accenture is a safe choice because nobody got fired for hiring
| Accenture. This executive likely jumped ship to another venture
| before the project failed, in the interim heralding themselves
| as a leader of a major strategic initiative. Long gone.
| torginus wrote:
| >nobody got fired for hiring Accenture
|
| Are you sure? It's not a name that inspires confidence.
| orangepurple wrote:
| Clients think a large consulting firm like Accenture can
| throw more bodies at the problem or rotate out under
| performers if things start to go wrong.
| googlryas wrote:
| Hertz hired a new CIO in 2015, and you can't just come in and
| keep the ship running in the same direction. You need new, big,
| flashy changes! Not just $32M, actually over $400M in changes,
| to prove the CIO knows what he's doing. Compare the article
| with the CIO's self provided description of his 3 years at
| Hertz(from his Linkedin):
|
| > I was hired by Hertz to integrate and optimize technology
| infrastructure following the acquisition of Dollar/Thrifty car
| brands into Hertz Global Holdings. Reported to the CEO and led
| a team of 1,200 professionals in eCommerce delivery, customer
| digital experience, digital business processes and
| communications, information security, IT operations and
| delivery, and new digital ventures. Consolidated car rental
| systems, transitioning from legacy mainframe to the Cloud and
| rebuilding the fleet reservation and accounting system to
| streamline all aspects of the customer lifecycle. Aligned
| digital initiatives (IoT, AI, CRM, Big Data, Mobile) into the
| strategic business planning process.
|
| > My Achievements Include:
|
| > SS Drove technology integration of the multi-billion dollar
| acquisition of Dollar/Thrifty car brands. Transitioned
| Mainframe/Cobol to Cloud/Microservices to support the new
| technology infrastructure utilizing an agile development cycle.
|
| > SS Reduced technology spend by 20% and enhanced customer
| service and product offerings through a complete system project
| redesign (CRM, Fleet, Rental, Reservation, Data Warehouse).
|
| > SS Improved marketing and revenue segmentation by optimizing
| technology to more effectively align brand/service offerings to
| Corporate vs. Leisure consumers.
|
| > SS Realized a 35% increase in website visits and 12% growth
| in conversion rates by spearheading redesign and modernization
| of the e-commerce platform utilizing microservices technology
| and AWS Cloud environment.
| rexreed wrote:
| This tells you everything you need to know about the kind of
| person that hires Accenture and what motivates them.
| Accenture will always be Accenture (and Deloitte, EY, PwC) as
| long as there's this CIO personality flaw of burning money
| doing flashy things without accomplishing much. Or in this
| case, anything at all.
| tpmx wrote:
| https://www.cio.com/article/191244/how-one-cio-and-hockey-
| co... (2021)
|
| _Veteran CIO provides his team with accountability, board
| exposure, and continual feedback to turn them into tomorrow's
| IT leaders._
| ChuckNorris89 wrote:
| _> My Achievements Include [...]_
|
| These all look like your typical resume inflating BS.
|
| Reminds me of the Silicon Valley series satire from Mike
| Judge.
| windows2020 wrote:
| I'm sure microservices and AWS and cloud were the reasons for
| the growth.
| register wrote:
| Companies hire Accenture and other firms like that usually
| because their demands are so challenging that only big firms
| can give a shot at that. On top of that usually the contracts
| provide so much strong guarantees to the Client that only these
| firms can afford and this is a tremendous incentive for closing
| the deal. It's a common strategy also to sell the initial
| contract at low margins with the outlook that the deal will
| continue and will bring other money with less risky maintenance
| streams. In a short summary in the vast majority of the cases
| these kind of projects already start with a lot of risk and on
| shaky grounds.
| airstrike wrote:
| I often wonder how much it would cost to literally hire the
| best freelancers in the market today to build their alternative
| to this monstrosity
| drdaeman wrote:
| Probably much less. The issue is finding those folks (or
| getting hold of their time).
| kingo55 wrote:
| 100x cheaper.
| karaterobot wrote:
| I'm not one of the best freelancers in the world, but I
| suspect that if I were, I would say there's no amount of
| money you could pay me, because I'm already making all the
| money I want working on projects I am interested in. The fact
| that, in our reality, Hertz went with Accenture, probably
| indicates they have other dysfunctions as well, and would be
| a pain to work with.
| slantedview wrote:
| > My main question is: who hires Accenture for this kind of
| job, for no less than $32m
|
| The cheapest people possible.
| z3t4 wrote:
| Software costs always grow exponentially. Having 1,800 IT systems
| sounds silly, but combining them into one system would not take
| X*1800 hours, it would take X^1800 hours.
| TheMagicHorsey wrote:
| I once worked at a startup that came very close to securing a
| development contract with <TELCO> to build an early App Store
| like functionality for them. There was a major consulting group,
| like Accenture, bidding against us. In meetings with us TELCO
| would relay to us all the wonderful things this consulting
| company promised, which made absolutely no sense to us given the
| budget TELCO had given us. We figured the consulting company must
| already have those capabilities built for other telco clients,
| and must be benefitting from their massive scale. I figured the
| TELCO IT team knew how to due diligence these kinds of things
| well, being that it was their entire job.
|
| We lost the sale because we told TELCO honestly that we could
| deliver what they wanted in the budget they had set. So TELCO
| went with the consulting company.
|
| 18 months later the consulting company came to us and offered to
| give us a subcontract to complete the project, within the scope
| we had originally offered to TELCO, for the same amount we had
| offered TELCO! We were stunned and could not understand how this
| could possibly make any sense economically. We had a meeting with
| the consulting company and took a look at the project status. It
| was a colossal pile of shit. Nevertheless, the consulting company
| promised that we would only be responsible for the scope they had
| laid out, which we were very comfortable delivering.
|
| We were about to sign a contract to do so, and one of our
| advisors said we should flip the desks, run out of the
| negotiation, under no circumstances sign the contract, and for
| good measure close the offices for a month and not answer any
| phone calls or emails from the consulting company.
|
| According to him getting involved in that project was in the very
| best case scenario going to destroy our morale and therefore
| destroy our team. And in the worst case would enmesh us in
| litigation and ruin all of our careers.
|
| We thought hard about it, because we needed the money, but
| ultimately we didn't sign the contract.
|
| Years later I met someone who worked for the consulting company
| and they told me that the project was an internal meme for a
| colossal disaster and shitshow. Apparently several consultants
| had nervous breakdowns over it. And one partner left the company.
| Meanwhile the project never saw light at TELCO.
| davman wrote:
| That certainly sounds like Accenture.
| bastardoperator wrote:
| I'd love to see the statement of work and bill of materials for
| this. I feel like this isn't Accenture's first rodeo.
| Tade0 wrote:
| I was an intern in Accenture in 2010.
|
| My general impression was that my role was actually "budget
| filler".
|
| Saved up for a laptop and a driving course, so can't complain.
| bastardoperator wrote:
| Billable Hours! This is why contracts should be outcome based
| and not based on hours. I don't care if the solution takes
| you ten days, or 10 minutes, it's the outcome that matters.
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