Hacker News Reader

Comment by chansiky | Hacker News Reader

For all the people talking about how much BS there is in big consulting, dont any of you think there could be a business model that could usurp the way the BS'ing boys club siphons money through narcissism, lies, and incompetence by replacing them with better quality development for a smaller price tag (but still with very well paid developers - from the looks of it)?

I'm personally thinking of a team building model where developers can join together and form teams to bid on projects and win financial rewards for delivering, reviewing, and passing quality benchmarks, with some sort of rating system in place to keep bad actors and bs-er's out.

View on HN

> form teams to bid on projects and win financial rewards for delivering, reviewing, and passing quality benchmarks

I work in a government agency and a friend is at another one. That would not work simply because the government is terrible at defining the project and actually hammering things down. I have been working on a project for nearly a year as an internal developer. I couldn't with any reasonable level of clarity tell you what it is my project needs to do.

An immediate problem I see with this is the realistic estimates problem. If you go to your average deloit/accenture customer and offer them the services of this anti-BS'ing boys club collective, and then deloit swoops in and says they'll do it in half the time and tick every single checkbox in the massive excel RFP including the contradictory requirements and the requirements that flat out make no sense, then guess who is likely to the win the bid? In the end it will be your deloits and your Accentures that win and then predictably the project will run long, not tick every requirement, and end up costing double.

> says they'll do it in half the time and tick every single checkbox in the massive excel RFP including the contradictory requirements and the requirements that flat out make no sense

I see your point, thanks for the counter arg, I can't refute this.

It seems the key strategy is to make the payer aware of how much BS they're paying for... but knowing all the people I know, I know that's just flat out not going to happen save for a very small percentage of people.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com