Comment by SavageBeast | Hacker News Reader

Comment by SavageBeast | Hacker News Reader

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Nobody wants to bring up Accenture here? Why should Deloitte get all the credit? There is plenty to go around. The large publicly traded consulting companies are like the mafia - once you let them in the door, they're not leaving until all your money is gone.

Thats all there is to it. Funny thing is those companies are never brought in by technical departments. My most recent experience saw the Marketing dept bring in CONSULTING COMPANY to do a particular job because the internal Engineering department's quote for the same work was "5 times what CONSULTING COMPANY said it should cost if they did it".

(queue violent laughter for those who have seen this joke play out)

It was a mess - consultants were as inept as they were numerous but damn, they dressed nice every day. They all had great glasses too, like they were assigned by the wardrobe department. Picture a Banana Republic Catalog's worth of new, very young people running around the office and you get it.

I'm not saying these consultants were inept because they couldn't invert a binary tree or because they couldn't tell me the time complexity of a HashTable. I'm saying it because they literally knew nothing aside from the intensive training CONSULTING COMPANY gave them for this job. If it was not covered in training they not only couldn't do it but didn't know what it was in the first place.

The whole project became a train wreck in slow motion. You could see it was going to be bad but it had so much momentum there was no chance of stopping it. Must be how the people felt on the Titanic come to think of it.

Things got so insane I realized that the consultants and those responsible were looking for someone to blame - and I promptly accepted a new job offer and vanished in a puff of smoke. I would later find out I was on the short list of people to be "promoted" to manage deliverables for that project!

After being laid off in 2016 I joined a big consulting company (you've heard of them but they're not Accenture) because I needed to pay the rent. I didn't come up through their training program as a new graduate but as an experienced developer.

Every year I got glowing praise from the client - I solved the problems they had faster than their in house guys did, I delivered on time with the lowest defects of any contractor across all firms that worked at the client, and was a domain expert in one of the client's systems after about six months there.

Do you know what the consulting company offered me as a raise? $150 on top of my base salary. Not $150 a week or month - $150 total. When my consulting company reviews came back, despite high praise from the client, I wasn't enough of a member of the consulting company's team because 1) I didn't hang out with only consultants from the company, 2) I didn't attend drinking events every week with consultants from that company, and 3) I was too specialized on what the client did, so how were they going to move me to another client for more money?

I stuck around for another year and then the client negotiated hiring me on directly.

I will starve before I work as a consultant at someone else's consultancy. I'll start my own one-man firm first.

Worked at an MSP. Company charged $165 an hour for my work. I was being paid $16 an hour. This is sysadmin/IT Infrastructure work.

This is a very skewed view of billing and profit. I have worked at consulting agencies as an engineer most of my career, in management for a few years, and have seen the numbers. There are quite a few overhead considerations you need to take into account. Just in payroll, a $16/hr employee is a lot more expensive than that number. Closer to $30-$50/hr with taxes, healthcare, and other per-person costs. Then add office space, equipment, sales and marketing cost, management, HR. Some management hours are billable but not most. Then consider that most employees don't bill 100% of hours. If we paid an employee for 40 hours, I would be impressed if the billable hours were more than 35 on a good week. (We did not bill for stand-ups, breaks, and other events that were not directly project-related.) Additionally consider the risk factor, that some clients end up not paying for one reason or another, or we comp time due to mistakes, going over budget, etc. We still pay the employee.

I'm not defending consultancies here - working at one would be my own personal hell on earth.

But when charge-out rates are so much higher than salaries, this is because their value is in the customer relationships and sales pipeline, not technical competence.

It's far, far easier to replace technical talent than to replace customers.

Just because you can make exorbitant profits off of your workers doesn't mean you necessarily should. I'll never understand why someone would you want to own a company that treats its people like shit and sucks to work for.

Why would they care? They’re running a company, not a charity.

Of course I don’t necessarily see it like that, but I can see how people would. Especially if they’re already competitive.

Why not necessarily on topic, I do wonder when this ruthless mindset will become viewed as a negative. Currently its perfectly normal to defend your dislikeable choices as business choices; because we are running a business.

I've had a couple ideas in the past for businesses that I always openly share with others in the nearest detail hoping someone would pick it up, with the thought that I don't wanna make money of it, I just want to have that product or service, simply because it's not there yet. I'm sure this mindset exists but I am unsure what a formal term might be. Utilitarian comes to mind but not quite.

It was seen as a negative hundreds of years ago, with the idea that workers aren't charities for their bosses.

But you need to actually have strong negotiating positions for workers in the first place :/

Middle management can run distraction on the owners so that they don't see the misery of the operations people who actually keep the buisness going.

>> Just because you can make exorbitant profits off of your workers doesn't mean you necessarily should. I'll never understand why someone would you want to own a company that treats its people like shit and sucks to work for.

> Middle management can run distraction on the owners so that they don't see the misery of the operations people who actually keep the buisness going.

More likely, the owner is greedy and just doesn't care about how miserable the employees are as long as the cash keeps coming in. Some people just plain lack the regular moral compass and feelings of empathy, and others have gotten good at holding on to BS justifications to assuage any guilt they feel.

Ownership was fully aware and encouraged.

This was the attitude 100%. Especially in Tech consulting, sales is everything, absolutely everything.

And sales commissions can be crazy high too. They are not just paying the IT people.. admins, HR, etc all need to get paid too.. not trying to defend crazy high rates...

> I'll start my own one-man firm first.

It's a shame there isn't a cheap turn-key way to do this right now. That could go a long way to unbundle these mega-consultants.

Company-creation-as-a-service (CCaaS) with shell-company-in-offshore-tax-haven (SCiOTH) and automatic-tax-minimization-as-a-service (ATMaaS) would go a long way to help the average small company reduce their expenses and to coax Congress into actually fixing tax loopholes which currently primarily help only the corps which are scummy enough to take advantage of these extreme tax-minimization techniques.

Stripe atlas gets you an LLC on Delaware for 500usd, close enough if you ask me.

I was an intern there almost 10 years ago. Apparently my job was to generate billable hours, because I wasn't given any work and when I asked for some I got a 700-page document to read.

After some nagging I was told to do the same thing one freshly minted consultant who was two years older than me was doing. She was clueless so I did both my part and hers.

The most sad/hilarious situation I had there though was when I bumped into my friend from university in the cafeteria, who was also an intern, but in a different company, and during our conversation it turned out that while I was doing essentially nothing and still got paid, he was working his ass off for free.

In hindsight I think his time was much better spent, but I really needed the money so I didn't complain.

Good on ya sir!! In the same situation I'd have done the same thing.

I've worked a place where IT only worked through consultants.

IT knew nothing about nothing and wouldn't hire anyone who knew technology. All projects were big buckets of money that they would hand to external consultants. Consultants would always take the money, sometimes they would do the work. IT was always certain that whatever the consultant delivered was best-in-class, exactly what should have happened because it was delivered in an Agile methodology and Gartner said nice things.

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