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Comment by rozenmd | Hacker News Reader

24 year olds? Since when are they sending the senior consultants out on engagements like this!

I lasted not even 6 months working in professional services, really woke me up to what "prestigious careers" really are.

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LOL and true to my experience. In the 80's was a United Airlines employee on a project where Arthur Anderson (aka Accenture) was the consultant. The project included approximately 75 entry level AA programmers that were brought to the office on two big buses. My job was to write specs for them. The specs had to be 100% detailed, every "if", every "loop", except that I had to follow the AA methodology and write the entire program basically in flowchart form. Pencil and paper. The spec was a looseleaf notebook of diagrams. The spec would then be stored in a box, like, the kind you would use for moving, and the boxes put into a storage room. If I needed to change a spec, an AA employee would have to climb the piles of boxes to find my box, and then I would use actual scissors, actual glue, to make the change.

It. Was. Insane.

Another golden memory of that project was when I was given the assignment to meet with users - accounting people - on screens for approving tax payments. It was kinda a big deal for me at that stage in my career, to even talk to users. So, I meet with these guys and I introduce the topic, and they go, "What are you talking about? What do you mean 'approving'? They are taxes. We HAVE to pay them"

I'm not sure I get what you're trying to say here. Yes, the company has to pay them but someone has to look at the numbers so that the company doesn't overpay or underpay.

And it sounds like the users didn't understand that in some manner.

Hmmm, what am I trying to say... I guess... as I think about it now, the lines of communication were very hierarchical - up and down the chain. But when it was time for me, a tech guy at the bottom, to talk to a user on the front lines, the disconnect was hilarious to me - but maybe you had to be there... I feel like I'm a boring old man telling this story.

Ahh I see. I can understand why it would bring you back that memory. I was just confused at first, cheers!

Say what you will about the Jira process, there is no climbing involved...

Perfect opportunity for a new corpspeak term.

"Let's sync this week for the pre-sprint Jira climbing"

Waterfall is so last week. Properly scheduled climbing projects meet MVP more often!

Yeah, Sooo over Waterfall. We do Wagile here!

(Hey, what are the worst bits of waterfall and agile? Let's combine them into our methodology!)

If you use Basecamp you can climb with hill charts: https://basecamp.com/features/hill-charts

I’m not even sure insane match what you just described at that point.

Now I know someone that do that for the software for subparts of nuclear reactors and it’s exactly all the same. The specs, the time to review, the politics of hierarchy, the time to fix a simple bug (can take 2 weeks for a simple if)… But at least the specs are in a software.

If you were building a nuclear reactor, would you err on the side of too much documentation, oversight, and code review, or too little?

I was just sharing the story.

Now 2 weeks for a simple change in a if. Some changes can take months and the software is not just a few line of code so if you do the math you may start to have rust on your hardware even before the v1.0 is out. Also nobody is going to read this type of “doc” but another schema spec coder if that’s the name.

That makes me think that formally proving the code correct using a proof assistant would actually be faster than the process you describe.

Just curious, but in the 1980's, what viable alternatives did you have to pen and paper? Did Visio exist? Did any flowchart tools exist, for DOS? For Apple ][? If they did, could you navigate, or print, a hundreds-to-thousands page flowchart in one of those OS'es?

If I had just written the program directly, I could have TYPED, and I could have used the backspace and delete keys to erase instead of an ACTUAL eraser, and I could have used cut and paste instead of ACTUAL scissors and paste.

Plus, I could have used the compile, test, debug cycle to verify that what I was writing actually worked.

My specs were the same complexity as the code: Let's pretend, for example, there were no "sort" statement in the computer language. My spec couldn't just say, "sort the names in alphabetical order". My spec had to have the exact logic of a sort algorithm, but drawn as a flowchart (actually, not a flowchart but an AA proprietary format)

I didn't have to do "sort", but I did have to code algorithms that were more complex than that.

BTW, to make it more fun, there were rules about who was allowed to talk to whom. I was not allowed to talk to the programmer who had to retype my spec into actual code. I didn't even know who he/she was. And the programmer wasn't allowed to talk to me directly, but had to go up a chain.

nice.. it's just "low code" :-)

Cutting and pasting with scissors and actual paste sounds pretty awful. But what I was hoping to get more insight about, if the task was to draw tens of thousands of pages of flowcharts (not text), would a 1980's PC (maybe 16mb RAM, 5.25" floppies, no GUI) be more efficient than a pen and paper? Even on a modern PC, I can often draw a flowchart quite a bit faster than I can create it in Lucidcharts or similar software.

I dunno. I myself was pretty clueless about PCs at that time. I owned a Kaypro from the early 1980s that ran CP/M, but I never touched a PC running Windows (or even just DOS) until 1994. They weren't part of the centralized IT departments I worked in. They WERE part of a sorta grass roots revolt by the user departments, setting up their own Lotus spreadsheets, whatever, as a way of bypassing the slow bureaucratic centralized IT departments.

How can the people who came up with this and put this system in place not know how insane this sounds?

I don't know. I speculate: So, like, the consulting company has to sell... something. They develop a... what was it called...a system development life cycle methodology? Maybe partly sincere, maybe partly bullshit, I dunno. I remember it visually as a shelf of several manuals. I imagine top AA partners selling to the top execs. Then everybody down the hierarchy doing what they've been told to do, being, not evil, but just respectful of the hierarchy. Also, many of those AA people only knowing the AA way, not having the experience, the confidence to be sure that the AA way was insane. Also, the way AA worked then "Up or Out", you are always competing with your peers. Not good for your career to rock the boat, to attack the methodology that the top partners had sold UAL.

And I don't think there was much that we as UAL employees could do. The fact that upper UAL management brought in AA to lead the project, to me, that means they were already dismissive of their in-house people and seduced by the outside people. Later in my career I experienced both sides of this a few times.

I only worked on the project 14 months. During that time the top AA partner in charge quit AA. Then the replacement quit AA, and maybe another. Maybe even they knew. I think a lot of people knew it was insane, but not able to change things as individuals.

Scott Adam’s has this covered.

https://dilbert.com/strip/2000-01-01?utm_source=dilbert.com/...

Ha! When I visit the link the page includes several banner ads for...Hertz!

Andersen Consulting/Accenture is my first job. Accenture directly sends me to the client after finishing my orientation program and 2-3 days of training. On my first day arrived at the client side for some initial discussion. I saw everyone standing with anxious faces and suddenly everyone spontaneously laughing. On lunch time, the client told me this was their first time engaging a big consultant firm and they did not expect a kid.

"Orientation program?" Did they not send you to CAPS in St. Charles?

St Charles. This brings back memories. I fly in at like 9pm and there is nothing open to eat, at all. Only one slice of leftover pizza at the "social centre", and it did taste like cardboard.

Ever go to Scotland Yard? The one bar in town. Some CLMs (career-limiting moves) took place there (not perpetrated by me).

When I joined Accenture, also as my first IT job out of college, we did training in a hotel room just of i35 in Austin.

I had never touched Java before, we did C at college, and became a Java developer after 3 days holed up with 10 other people doing coding challenges on a laptop.

I didn't get to go to any of the training centers until I'd been there for a year.

Ah. Well, believe it or not, Andersen's six-week programming boot camp in St. Charles was still in COBOL... in the '90s. That was mainly because their biggest customers were government and industry firms running huge legacy systems. Think Raytheon, McDonnell-Douglass, Hershey.

Eventually they did switch to C. I wonder what the curriculum is today.

This was 2003, and was for a job with the State. I was absolutely atrocious as I had no idea what I was doing and really got no support to figure out how to code in the real world. Knowing now what I know now, that codebase could only have been created by sticking new grad after new grad on it without any peer reviews. The amount of nested if statements made it impossible to follow.

I don't know why anyone would hire these consulting firms other than plausible deniability of blame.

I would imagine that most large corporations and government code is still Java, only specialist systems are still COBOL.

"The amount of nested if statements made it impossible to follow"

I'm floored that you mentioned this. One memory I often cite of my early days there was walking past a colleague's desk and seeing a diagonal line of text from the upper-left corner of her monitor to the lower-right. Closer inspection revealed that she was processing a 30-character part number with as many nested IF statements, instead of iterating through it.

Even as a 21-year-old I was appalled that this was being delivered to clients.

It was awful, but not being exposed to Java, or professional development before I assumed it was how it was meant to be.

I still have to use Java from time to time, and I dislike the amount of "Spring magic" that colleagues try to use with it. No wonder the kids end up writing junk, they are used to never understanding what's going on anyway.

kid/no kid is one thing, but were you able to deliver the insights they expected? I know I'd be pissed if I paid a high rate expecting an expert and then got a guy who doesn't know either.

A 22-yr old kid? I don't care how many future presidents you rubbed shoulders with at Yale, the answer is NO.

Consultants and agencies typically give all of the actual work to young 22-28 year olds. Leadership focuses on acquiring new business. Once they get your business they really do not care what happens beyond generally fulfilling the contracted requirements.

“Consulting is a test. You pass when you leave.” - Unknown

When I graduated back on 2010, Accenture has been around and was invited for an interview but I somehow got cold feet. In my country Accenture is one of the longest established companies here that hires fresh graduates who don’t know anything. I believe a part of that team are fresh graduates and bureaucratic project managers who have no clue how technology works but got promoted because of the college they came from.

I wonder what country this is..

Currently living in Latvia, I've seen Accenture, Cognizant and other agencies have a strong presence in many local ICT events, such as DevTernity, Riga DevDays, DSS ITSEC and many others. I think that's just the way things are, they also advertise their vacancies to universities here and thus are many people's first experiences with software development in a professional setting. Of course, the results there vary, as with most jobs.

I don't think we have such a strong tech scene here or that many household names, to work in SaaS companies, though I've also just seen that quite a few EU job vacancies are for companies for whom software development is a supporting activity (sometimes very important, other times less so) as opposed to their main and only way of earning money.

Maybe I've just been looking in the wrong places, but I don't think almost any of my direct acquaintances work for SaaS/IaaS/PaaS vendors either.

Probably India.

It’s in the Philippines.

did time contracting in medicaid, heard legends of $1100/hr java dev billing codes on big 5 contracts staffed by college hires (never saw first hand); also heard of big 5 contracts pass through 4 wrap layers of subsidiary (each raking 30% of whatever passed through) and end up staffed in india

They aren't called Beltway Bandits for nothing.

The only consulting firm I've ever heard spoken of somewhat favorably is McKinsey (and then only by ex-McKinsey people)

The kind of work that McKinsey does is much different to most of the work done by firms like Accenture. The latter may do some strategy-level work for managers / senior managers, but the largest portions of their revenue comes from work like BPO and technology implementations.

Perhaps, but their contributions to the opiate epidemic in the US makes me dislike the company - I know I'd never work there.

Accord to another article McKinsey "encouraged ICE to give less food and medical care to detainees."

https://mattstoller.substack.com/p/why-taxpayers-pay-mckinse...

> Such practices used to be called “honest graft.” And let’s be clear, McKinsey’s services are very expensive. Back in August, I noted that McKinsey’s competitor, the Boston Consulting Group, charges the government $33,063.75/week for the time of a recent college grad to work as a contractor. Not to be outdone, McKinsey’s pricing is much much higher, with one McKinsey “business analyst” - someone with an undergraduate degree and no experience - lent to the government priced out at $56,707/week, or $2,948,764/year.

And not for a cheap fee either!

Yeah well https://www.nytimes.com/2022/03/31/world/europe/macron-franc...

A lot of those ex-McKinsey people ended up at Enron, at least for a while...

http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2002/07/22/the-talent-myth

Enron sounds eerily familiar to today's tech companies...

If you’re discussing Enron and consulting you could just go straight for Accenture’s predecessor: Arthur Andersen which was the responsible party.

Arthur Andersen and Andersen Consulting had an expensive divorce in 1997ish, and Andersen Consulting became Accenture.

A very wise investment (basically the Accenture partners needed to pay off the rest of the AA partnership to leave) in retrospect.

AA based on my impressions was the top of the big 6 accounting firms in size and reputation. Wow did they bite it hard in Enron. They probably all fled like rats to the rest of the former big 6, but all that hard earned reputation....

Even then, quote my father "I only hired them when I wanted outside support for an initiative or to sink someone else's". Meaning, it's just politics and they will never go against the executive that brings them in

Why Taxpayers Pay McKinsey $3M a Year for a Recent College Graduate Contractor:

https://mattstoller.substack.com/p/why-taxpayers-pay-mckinse...

I unfortunately cannot second this - I went to college with a colleague who went on to work at McKinsey, and who I worked with on a project after he left them.

At this point in his career, 3 years after his PhD, he was unable to do anything except put on cufflinks and produce 120-slide Powerpoint presentations that went 30min overtime like he was working for the DoD.

It was an incredibly saddening sight. I talked to him about this and he was 100% convinced that he was doing his absolute top work by having pointless meeting after pointless meeting talking about nothing at all at great length.

The mindset of charging the maximum number of hours for minimal output is really hard to break out of. You can take the man out of McKinsey, but you can't take McKinsey out of the man.

I agree that McKinsey sucks, just pointing out that it's the only one with a facade of prestige (anecdotally)

Is there good money to be made though? If idiots are happy to pay more for shit than they do for quality work I'll happily deliver them shit.

your sales game needs to be world class though. that’s all that really matters.

Did you read the title?

When I was at a consulting firm in London that I wont name, I was charging them 700GBP a day, and they were charging the end client 1500GBP a day (I saw this on an internal presentation slide I was not supposed to see)

The difference between employee salary and effective hourly rate, and billable rate, is not usually particularly secret, and usually doesn't make any sense first time, or even 20th time one sees it. The billable rate is some outer space number with no meaningful connection to real world. If you stick long enough you'll realize that billable rate is not what consulting company charges for you. It's what they charge for you and the non billable boss, senior partner, salesperson, delivery excellence review people, Admin and hr support, half a dozen people who did the bids and proposal, legal, the first phase of the project company did as loss leader, and then for all those things multiplied by contracts not won. this too is not a particular secret either internally or to the client.

If you go as a independent contractor, you can bill close to that rate yourself, but may find that you can't bill quite that rate as the mandatory middle vendors will take their obligatory cut, you need health insurance and your own expenses and any moment you're not working whether between contracts or vacation is lost money. Still makes sense for some people, less for others. Depends on your expertise, preferences, sales and networking skills, and how good is your accountant. Always better to build reputation and then become small consulting company yourself, billing billable rates and paying salary rates to others.

(This is in the world of consulting. Math may be different in world of independent freelance technical developers)

Your firm was charging just over 2x, but in the US it's not uncommon to see the client billed 3x what the consultant makes. This is especially true if there are subcontractors.

Pretty sure i was billed at 10x when I started at Andersen Consulting in 1990. My starting salary was 21.5k.

I don't doubt it, for one of the Big Names. I know 3x is common even in smaller shops. I don't doubt that places like Wipro, Infosys and the other big names that work the US H-1B market have much larger markups.

Can confirm, at a big 4, billed out at 8x

There is also rack rate and discount rate. The rack rate can be insanely high. The discount will take into account several things. 1. How much does the consulting company wants to work with a client? If it is seen as a high profile client or has long term potential then the discount rate will be better. 2. How long will the assignment be? The longer the assignment, the more billable hours for a person and the lesser the company is still paying a full time person when they are not billable. 3. How much is the sales person trying to make a sale? It's the delivery teams' issue to deal with not enough margin to deliver under budget =or just change order the heck out of the client after the sale.

When I was doing consulting in the UK, there were often layers of white label.

Client hires company A, who bill 2.5kGBP.

Company A outsources to Company B at ~1.5kGBP.

Company B outsources to Company C for 700GBP.

Consultant at Company C makes buggery fuck all, and has to unravel the mess of Chinese whispers/obfuscation to work out what the job actually is and who they are meant to be pretending to be that day, whose report template was being used, etc.

If you've never worked for a big consulting shop it's hard to explain what it can be like. I BILLED 2,800 hours my first (and only) full year, and spent most weeks out of town. They love to take you out for dinner with your consulting coworkers while on engagement, but you quickly realize this is to (a) keep you onsight until 7 or 8pm, (b) prevent you from developing a life outside of the company, and (c) hey, maybe we should head back to the office after dinner for a little bit... It's fun for a while when you're young, single and stupid.

I know that some consulting shops are sweat shops like you describe, but not all are. I worked for one of the major consulting Big4s and my experience couldn't be more different (except for spending most weeks out of town).

I was there for 5 years, and with the exception of one single project that lasted 1.5 months, all of my teams would leave the office no later than 6pm, and not once did I or anyone I ever worked with ever go back to the office later in the night. Once we gathered at the hotel bar after dinner with our laptops to practice a presentation we were giving the next day, but that's it.

It also wasn't difficult at all to develop a life outside of the company, even with the weekly travel. I spent a lot of time with coworkers, yes, but on most of my teams I genuinely enjoyed that time (and even long after leaving I am still close friends with many of them). We had hobbies together (would go to the gym together sometimes, explored different neighborhoods in town, played video games together, watched sports together, etc). If you're the type of person that thinks "work is only for work and therefor I can never be 'friends' with a coworker", then consulting isn't for you, but not everyone is like that.

The work-life balance and the general fun that I had were my favorite parts of consulting. I left because I found that every project I was on was inherently a "this company is full of incompetent morons and so they're hiring a bunch of mediocre consultants to come in and hold everyone's hand", and after several years it just got exhausting to always be the adult in the room.

This is my experience with big accounting/finance firms as well.

If you deliver shit then they keep coming back to you to fix it. Pretty sure there are major consulting firms playing that game.

it’s not that they want to fail delivery; it’s that any new small agile firm of like 10 people who manages to qualify and deliver in some small project will instantly have so much demand that they will scale from 10 to 100 people in short order until they cannot effectively manage and turn into the the thing they hate. and contracting is low margin after bizdev costs, the economics really aren’t there so you make money by squeezing labor salaries. you can’t raise rates because moral hazard - you’d have immediate incentive to pocket the margin. behold the stable state.

This is not really true at least everywhere. In Europe and especially North Europe smaller (less than 1000 ppl) consultancies are usually the most lax and best paid jobs with best benefits out there and the best ones definitely do raise their rates.

It's just about what kind of clients you want to work with. If you pick any client that comes to your door and never say no then you'll end up in the race to the bottom with these large outsourcing corps.

Picking a consultant is like picking a tradesperson -- the competent ones already have more business than they can service, so they'd be doing you a favor by taking you on, which usually means an introduction from an existing client is needed.

Oh, and also, if you suck as a client, they're going to drop you and never answer your calls again.

raise rates to what? from $260 per hour (USA) to $300? there’s only so much a client can optically tolerate, the proposals are already fine tuned to the same maximum as everyone else. same problem in legal industry, you can’t get the partner bill rate up to $5k/hr (how rude) but you can bill 10 associates to “research” at $500

I don't know where the parent worked, but I expect the rates are 120€-180€ (company billing, not your salary). It's just that most other companies pay smaller salaries as there traditionally was very few tech companies with competitive pay. It's been slowly improving though.

They are not happy to pay for shit, but they are tricked into thinking that they can get same quality from India outsourcing as from actual professional devs/companies. Later they get angry and then they'll go to court. The order is following: 1) Sales people 2) Developer 3) Lawyers

I've seen it repeatedly, how they think you'll get the same quality product outsourced to the cheapest consultancy in India is beyond me.

The business never learn and if it wasn't for experienced DevOps managers intervening they'd still use sweatshop devs that barely speak English on their first gig.

I accepted an offer this year for $150k as a sr assoc at a big 4 consultancy doing "dev" work, so for me, it was worth it. 3 years as a dev before

LOL!

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