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Comment by S_A_P | Hacker News Reader

IBM is a failed services company. Ive been a subcontractor for 2 projects run by IBM. Both fiascos of mismanagement. The project management at IBM had an incredible churn rate. On the first project, they were kicked off for completely failing to deliver. The second project had them completely marginalized. The sad thing is that it was another "big 4" consulting company that took over, who was only slightly less incompetent. I really have trouble understanding the big 4 consulting model. It mainly seems to consist of the following:

1) plant 2-300% of the consultants on site that are necessary 2) create an enormous amount of power point slides that look impressive but mainly say nothing 3) outsource the real work to India or cheap labor 4) deliver 25% of the requirements in 300% of the time

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the model is mostly around slick sales people scoring fat contracts from largely non-technical corporate bureaucrats.

the rest is just trying to deliver as little as possible, as cheaply as possible, without outright violating the contract.

real shame to apply the flimflam business consulting ethos to the it consulting arena, but it is the way of things.

"I really have trouble understanding the big 4 consulting model. It mainly seems to consist of the following"

I think that, as with enterprise software, is mostly about the management in the customer company trying to cover his/her ass. Big four and similar are the less risky options, not for the project but for the managers.

'Yes, the project was a disaster, but I hired IBM, so, no responsibility here.'

Of course, the management of the customer and the consulting companies are normally old friends. That helps too.

I was a "subcontractor" on 4 major IBM internal projects. All failed due to bad management. Then IBM became a services company.

IBM has been failing for a long time.

the Big 4 win contracts based on necessary certifications. once it is a 100mil+ project, all kinds of certs come into play, small shops simply can't produce the paperwork.

of course, there is no correlation between certs and actually being able to deliver anything, but that does not matter. no CIO will risk their career by not giving big stuff to a non-Big4 contract.

file under herd mentality, etc.

What certs are we talking about? SSL certs? PE certs? Cisco certs?

ha, no.

ITIL, ISO 20000, etc etc etc.

What kind of consulting was that? Anything about development?

Yes. I write custom code for several commodity trading risk management software platforms along with integration, implementation, interfaces, etc.

That sounds complex, not something you want to outsource to a random freelancer

I hope you are being sarcastic. But I understand the point you make. For the systems I work on the number of skilled workers that can move quickly on a project is in the dozens. It's definitely a risk but the few in the niche do ok. The problem is that big consulting thinks they can stick a talented developer in there and not require the 18 month learning curve to ramp up.

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