Comment by stevetursi | Hacker News Reader

Comment by stevetursi | Hacker News Reader

I am Hertz Alumni, 2011-2016. We had a great group of engineers and product people, many of us far too talented to be in company like what hertz turned into. We were under the leadership of an incredible division head and most of the folks in our group felt a deep sense of loyalty to her. Nearly all of us, including that division head, are gone now, mostly laid off. If you poll any random Hertz alumnus, the story you're likely to hear is "we had a great team and incompetent senior management."

To us, there is a quote in a different bloomberg article from last week [1] which strikes us as accurate. Attributed to Maryanne Keller, who is referred to in this article, it says:

> 'It’s a saga about gross mismanagement,” said Maryann Keller, a longtime auto-

> industry consultant who was on the board of Dollar Thrifty when Hertz acquired

> the company. “It could have been salvaged had he picked the right management,”

> she said, referring to Icahn.'

Icahn lost $1.6b. Thousands of us lost our jobs. But these C-suiters sailed the company to bankruptcy over five years, each of them extracting 7 or 8 figure bonuses. The CIO who laid us all off, for example, received $6.5 million compensation that year [2]. (Sidenote, the work we were doing was replaced with Accenture consultants, who couldn't handle it, screwing up so bad they ended up in court [3].)

One former colleague of mine wrote a post on LinkedIn suggesting Icahn was the unwitting victim of untenable debt situation, and while he may be correct that the debt made it difficult, Icahn can read a balance sheet and he understood the situation.

I can't speak about Marinello's performance, but I agree that the problem dates back to 2014 or even earlier. People have a widespread belief that Frissora was flying too close to the sun, driven by his aggressive personality. Despite his flaws, he had a great team of people who kept the business running, and it wasn't Frissora who fired them all. Nobody, it turns out, was a fan of him. But everyone agrees he was far better than the gang of unusually wealthy miscreants that Icahn replaced him with.

[1] https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2020-05-27/icahn-fil...

[2] https://www.cio.com/article/3404205/how-much-do-cios-really-...

[3] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=19737070

I had the unfortunate opportunity as an Accenture consultant to work on the Hertz redesign. It was a shit show and hands down the worst project I've ever been on. I left Accenture but not sure how much I'm allowed to talk about it.

Needless to say, leadership across ALL disciplines (mobile, front-end, backend, etc) was a fucking joke and they didn't listen to the red flags we brought up in literal sprint 1.

Sorry to hear about your Hertz experience.

For the most part, all that I've heard of Accenture seems to match what you are saying.

I believe the parent comment was talking about the shitshow that Hertz was, not Accenture.

Both are bad. Every big "consulting" company sucks nowadays.

> Both are bad. Every big "consulting" company sucks nowadays.

From what I've heard, Accenture always sucked (except at C-suite sales, which I guess is all that really matters).

I've had good experiences with Accenture in a staff aug role, but leading projects have been disasters. Similar problems working with Deloitte.

That being said, I've had nothing but good experiences working with McKinsey.

Accenture tops the list though. I've worked with other consulting companies that are better compared to them.

There’s a couple of us that were on the Accenture frontend team of the Hertz project that, justifiably, became amazing friends after such a dumpster fire of a project.

Accenture was just as culpable as Hertz in terms of incompetence and negligence.

Oh no, definitely calling out ACN, where I worked at the time. Sorry if that wasn't clear.

A remarkably large number of job offers/bid requests I've seen start with some variation of "Accenture screwed up and [client] is looking for someone else to take over". And looking at the former co-workers that have landed there it's not even a little surprising they're that bad.

I've seen this more than once. Senior management thinks maintaining a portfolio of software applications is like flipping hamburgers: they see no problem or risks in one team of developers handing the spatula to another team. What, wasn't the one-day knowledge transfer session not enough? So, the transfer from the home-grown team to Accenture is screwed up. Let's try it again, from the Accenture team to another team; lightning cannot strike twice, can it?

It's not the transfer. Accenture (or at least some parts of it) are just that bad.

Yep. Worked for a company that was brought in to fix what Accenture messed up. Sadly they were able to regain the contract that I worked on because of some bizarre run around involving another contract.....

What’s funny is that the Hertz website became so bad that I gradually stopped using Hertz (former Presidents Circle guy). Never knew that it was because they fired their entire team and replaced it with an offshore team.

My experience with Accenture is that you start with two blokes from Accenture in your team as fellow consultants and before you know there are 10 Accenture people without knowing what they are doing. On some projects I worked with them you had test teams in Manilla which just didn't do anything so you ended up doing all testing too.

The company is bankrupt, but Hertz is a success story for the executives who got rich and got out.

The incentives encourage destruction through short term value extraction at the expense of long term health.

> "we had a great team and incompetent senior management."

Whether or not it's true, I think you'll find this sentiment from any engineering level alum from a big company that died.

Well yeah, it's not typically the engineering dept. that runs the boat into the iceberg.

Specific metaphor chosen on purpose.

2014 - its interesting this is when headquarters moved from NJ to Florida. Its a bit like SV - are California/North East expensive because its worth it? I'm not sure if Hertz went downhill because of the move or you just can't run a smart company from Florida.

You can probably run a smart company from Florida if you start there but can you transplant a company from New Jersey to Florida and expect it to survive?

These corporate HQ moves don't seem to work out well (e.g. Boeing)

Physical locations matters. I feel like we're appreciating the advantages -- but also the deep shortcomings -- of remote work and distant offices.

I have a family member that worked for Hertz during the time of this move.

After a lot of consideration and soul searching, they decided not to move down because both his family and his wife’s family were in the North East U.S. and they had small kids who wouldn’t have adjusted well to a cross-country move.

So somewhat reluctantly, he resigned his job with Hertz and stayed back while the rest of the team moved down. It was difficult for him because he had worked there for a number of years to reach the level that he was at and essentially reset when he switched jobs.

Anyway, a short time after that, he found out that everyone he worked with and had made the move to Florida had been laid off by Hertz.

He dodged a bullet on that one. I always suspected the move was a strategic-but-unethical one by Hertz to terminate a whole bunch of people without drawing too much attention to themselves. (Older employees with families typically don’t make moves like that, and you can easily get rid of the rest after.)

Can confirm, I have many anecdotes of folks who moved and regretted it, and people who found new local jobs who were grateful. It was gut-wrenching for almost everyone.

Our department was an exception. We got to stay in NJ (they laid us all off two years later.)

Icahn is doing just fine. https://www.epsilontheory.com/the-hertz-story-isnt-what-you-...

He also cleaned up with covid bailout funds to close his losing position with Herbalife. The man is a walking plague.

We overlapped for a short time. It was my first job straight out of college. I worked around some really nice people but even my inexperienced self knew that it wasn't a good environment to grow (terrible code base, silo-ed teams, archaic processes, weeks onboarding, etc) so I left after 6 months.

I think it was about a year later when I heard the IT team was fired. The kicker: a lot were hired by IBM _and subsequently contracted to work for Hertz_ on the exact thing they were working on before.

Safe to say I didn't regret my decision at all

It's interesting to hear both sides.

> Sidenote, the work we were doing was replaced with Accenture consultants, who couldn't handle it, screwing up so bad they ended up in court [3].

And elsewhere...

> I had the unfortunate opportunity as an Accenture consultant to work on the Hertz redesign. ... Needless to say, leadership across ALL disciplines (mobile, front-end, backend, etc) was a fucking joke and they [presumably Hertz?] didn't listen to the red flags we brought up in literal sprint 1.

I think they mean Accenture leadership

Could be; I only worked in one company with Accenture (and during the AC->Accenture migration), and the management in that gig was 100% "host company".

My original post makes it sound like the accenture engineers dropped the ball. That was not my intention. I wasn't personally involved, had already gone on to other things. My impression, in talking to hertz people over the subsequent years, were that the engineers were fine; it was an issue of sales overpromising and resource allocation, as well as incongruities between stakeholders, but that's second and third-hand information, so take that for what it's worth.

Mind naming names on the “incredible division head”?

sorry, but I'm certain she would prefer I didn't.

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