Using a throwaway here, but I stayed at Accenture for much too long (years). I ended up moving to a household-name tech company and never looked back. This move was not intentional. Despite having glowing performance reviews as an hands-on engineer, my business group felt my skills were mismatched. And they were - they wanted specific certified consultants in the business group and my expertise was building general cloud-native systems.

The very unfortunate thing is most of my ex-colleagues have climbed the ladder to a point with no perceived way down or up. They think they are “managers” and believe they are equivalent to one in tech, but no tech company wants some 7+ year tenure Accenture “manager” managing their engineering teams when all they’ve done is sent out product specs to an offshore team. Even if that offshore team is awful, they’re still doing the hard work of architecting and creating the code. The onshore “manager” is just a face for the team.

Some are genuinely good at their job, but they’ll need to transition to non-tech F500 companies to do anything with a similar prestige to what they’re doing now.