Comment by justbored123 | Hacker News Reader

Comment by justbored123 | Hacker News Reader

I started my career in Accenture as a bright eye systems engineer that wanted to work with cool people and program computers and build cool stuff. O boy did they stomped that naive dream fast.

I was basically one of the offshore resources in a third world country mentioned in the other comments that gets payed peanuts (USD 420 a month to be precise, minimum wage in my country) and has zero experience but gets sold like he is a senior engineer. All my team was like that, there were only trainees and 2 semi seniors on my team. My "architect" didn't knew Java at all, the language of the project, and the person sitting besides me didn't knew what a bubble sort was but was trying to implement a sorting algorithm in C as part of the software that controlled the entire mobile telecom network for Spain (did not end well).

The culture is up or out, completely cutthroat, a nightmare. They apply something called "the tooth paste tube principle" to their employees: the more you squeeze, the more it comes out (I actually heard that from one of the managers there). The model is endless armies of low wage trainees on third world countries that get sold as "seniors" and get pay little so they will take as much overtime as possible to actually make a living wage. The good thing? They will hire almost anybody and they give you a month full time training free before you start, so if you want a place to start with a very low entry bar or are looking for free training, or you are a sociopath and like playing power games with people and walking over them, this is you place.

If I sound bitter 15 years later it's because I still am.

Why are major telecoms companies asking Accenture for help? Do they not have their own devs? If Accenture employees are this bad you might as well hire anyone with software engineer on their CV.

Often in telecoms, the root issue is they don't want people on payroll. They're trying to outsource everything possible - their vendors now provide managed services etc. Telecoms companies in Europe at least are just financing a range of contracts to keep things running.

Having to hire in more staff creates cost liabilities for them. They'd rather outsource things. That means they lose the skills in-house, and often end up needing consultants to help fill the gaps in their knowledge (after having lost their skilled people to the outsourcing companies, or other sectors).

Some telecoms companies have outsourced their development to Tech Mahindra and others already... And yes, in my personal view, they'd be far better hiring random software engineers and undoing the decline in control and understanding of their own business they've overseen.

Spot on, its often middle management not really understanding engineering, and think they can do better by just have someone else do it for them, but total lack of foresight on the consequences, which to be fair they probably won't have to deal with before they switch jobs.

The chronic short-term thinking seems to come from the "business" pressures to deliver results by financial quarters to meet specific dates/deadlines. The business is expected to align around these timelines, even where inconvenient.

I've seen car dealers offering significant discounts because they are trying to hit their end-of-quarter target. I've locked-in phone contracts with service at below the actual handset cost (when multiplied out by the contract duration) because I called late in the day on the last day of the quarter, and staff are trying to hit bonuses.

Something you do see a lot in telecoms is entering an outsourcing contract where you transfer your own (skilled, experienced) engineering staff out to the contractor - this is long-term suicide, but in the short-term it reduces your outgoings on the balance sheet.

To me, this is proof that it's just a game of short-term balance-sheet bingo, and I think you hit the nail on the head - the managers won't have to deal with this, as they'll bounce to another "generic business role" and ruin that organisation in a few months.

Indeed, you'd think that the whole business of telecom companies would be tech and they'd have in-house engineering resources to innovate and gain an edge on their competitors... in reality, a lot of it is outsourced to idiots from Accenture and similar.

Here's an eye-opening post: https://berthub.eu/articles/posts/5g-elephant-in-the-room/

Why does vodafone need a CTO if they outsource everything?

Youd think banks would be tech companies but they dont have a good rep for being a dev there in most cases

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