Accenture would cut 19,000 jobs
reuters.com
reuters.com
[1] https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/222166/which-dia...
https://twitter.com/koolhead17
I thought that this was an Americanism (as I tend to assume that all weird misuse of English is) - thanks for teaching me something new :)
It implies a conditional.
Edit: I see OP got this from the phrasing in the article "[Accenture] said on Thursday it would cut about 2.5% of its workforce..." . Not valid without the "they said."
They do do some IT consulting, among other things, but the vast majority of their workforce is providing cheap sales & support staff to FAANG companies - these companies are famous for having well-remunerated staff, with generous benefits, hired through protracted interview processes. In reality most people actually working on their products are hired cheaply through vendors like Accenture and Cognizant.
That's fair (though I can't edit now) - it's certainly not exclusively FAANG, though it is a significant percentage. Public contracts may be a similar or larger percentage.
I worked a lot with Accenture, enterprise context.
https://www.nytimes.com/2021/08/31/technology/facebook-accen...
Not for engineering work.
Vendors and Contractors typically have support roles like internal and external customer support or IT support. Processes that can't be automated will typically be sent to contractors until it's expensive enough that FTE automate it.
Both were terrible.
Major consulting companies hire everywhere and have offices everywhere. Excepting the last couple of years, which are looking like an anomaly at this point, FAANG requires one to relocate to NYC/SF/Seattle. There are a lot of bright people who can't make that move, so consulting ends up being a good alternative. In non-HCOL markets, consulting pay is usually some of the best.
Unless you make partner, comp is going to be just base + bonus without equity. Even outside of HCOL, base can end up being higher than base at FAANG, which means when FAANG equity is down big like it is right now, the gap narrows.
Partner at a Big-4 or McKinsey/BCG/Bain will reliably pull $1m TC after a year or two. IMO making partner is easier than making FAANG director. PWC and EY both have 3-4,000 partners, for example. McKinsey has 2,700 partners and only 38,000 employees (a good chunk of which are back-office non-billable). Contrast that with the number of L8+ at FAANG which is usually 5-10x fewer, from what I can gather.
Ultimately if you imagine a 28 year old consultant making $170k in Kansas City working remotely with a FAANG team of 24 year olds making $200k in Mountain View, it's quite possible that the consultant is banking more than the FAANG team, and with a different potential trajectory comp-wise.
Now lots of projects are uninteresting. There are still elite and specialized consultants who do complicated stuff but they are a minority. Often the teams now are just 'staff augmentation' - headcount outside of headcount.
For programmers consulting never really made much sense anyway. Why sit at BIG4 company making slides when you can sit in FAANG coding? Consulting was always for finance guys. But now top finance guys go to investment banking, machine learning or (as funny as it sounds) crypto. There are still good projects with good exit opportunities in finance, but it is night and day when compared to 80s or 90s - when consultants were the true elite.. just because they could see how things are made in different companies. Now the companies blog how they do stuff.
You get lots of at bats to do “something big” as opposed to 9-5 keep the lights on work that most engineers do for years in stagnant, highly politicized cultures year after year waiting for their boss to quit to get a promotion. It’s also a good way to level up a stagnant career.
The downsides include always “living in someone else’s house”, having to adapt to the clients tech and culture, having to leave your work behind and start from scratch.
Agreed that these type of shops are in the minority and once they scale, they exit to the big guys who then kill the culture and drive away the talent.
Palantir (from the outside) seems like a good example of this dynamic scaling along with the advantages of maintaining their own stack. Could you imagine what it would be like to be an engineer employed by the customers they serve?
This is a seriously underrated comment. While having sometimes dismal reputations, IT MSPs and (SWE, DevOps) staffing firms often having legitimate rockstars. Some of the best, most efficient engineers I have worked with were employed by these types of companies. This involves delivering solutions on time to the customer while retaining soft skills, often while being the enemy of the incumbent engineers.
My anecdotal evidence is that those small starter teams do deliver alot of value, of which the client likes and wants more of. However the client does not have the resources to do this themselves (Likely the reason ACN are there to start).
Then from here it's self-fulfilling, more people leads to more projects leads more resources.
Those same hierarchies will then inevitably fail to make proper use of the contractors, just as they failed to make use of their employees, leading to seemingly "useless" TVCs "bloating" the org. Symptom rather than cause of the client's failings.
They expect half of the reduction to be in their non-billable corporate area.
It's also fascinating to realize that their REVENUE per employee is ~85K USD.
Is it me or this number is ridiculously awful? I work for a small firm that isn't even US-based and we are easily at multiples of that figure.
[0] https://timesofindia.indiatimes.com/business/india-business/...
Private sector White collar salaries in VN, Thailand, and India are roughly comparable.
That said, there isn't as deep a bench of expendable somewhat English fluent software talent in VN or TH (largely due to the explosion in technical colleges teaching basic fizzbuzz in India and the lack of English medium education in VN+TH).
Both VN and TH are also clearly targeting South Korean and Japanese companies instead of American ones ime due to the 2013-17 Trade War between PRC and Japan+SK.
Labor costs are only one part that detract from your margin, you also have to consider productivity (what are you getting for your costs) and overhead (what taxes/bribes/rents do you need to pay). It is really easy to set up in a developing country and lose money rather than make it.
Heck, a lot of Vietnamese prefer studying and working abroad in Thailand because salaries and development is higher than in VN and only the elite can afford to send their kids to VinUni or RMIT Saigon.
The original premise that Thailand is cheaper than India is definitely wrong, we both can probably agree on that.
I think the issue was Google Search's summarization algorithm parsed the wrong sentence in a non-verified website (I did the same search you did and recreated your issue).
Also, the same thing holds for China as well. BKK =/= Thailand and Shanghai/Beijing/Tianjin =/= China as well. Not to mitigate the massive amount of development that China has seen the past 20 years, but Thailand's subregional development (measured via HDI) is very even - the poorest region (Isan) has a HDI of around 0.781 and the richest (BKK the prefecture, not the city) is around 0.839 in 2021. Compared to China outside of Tier 1 cities it's a significant difference (and on a separate note Ik Chinese policymakers have been looking into Thailand's anti-poverty policies to replicate them in Shaanxi)
Thailand back slided during the last decade because of political instability. Having a military coup every couple of years isn't great for business. Although I agree that .68 is too low for Thailand from personal experience. It feels like Thailand should still be above China, but I'm not confident in making that call without seeing the numbers crunched (so I'm willing to accept your numbers more than the ones I found via a quick Google search).
Generally speaking, the median Thai person does tend to have a better life than the median Chinese person, simply because poverty eradication has been a pretty significant plank of both the Junta and the elected politicans, plus the massive amount of FDI coming in from SK+Japan after the whole 2013-2017 trade war.
But then again, comparing a Billion+ country that gives significant administrative autonomy to provinces with a unitary country with a population comparable of Zhejiang might be unfair. At least on a developmental and economic level, Thailand would be comparable to Jiangsu or Zhejiang.
So everyone has to earn at least below 50k?
I mean overhead cost, building rents and c level salaries?!
you dont even want to know, just be sure that if they get invited in to join a project, leave! At least from my experience on their IT side, was it Andersen before a rebrand? Drop in 3 developers, then sell a 'manager' to oversee them, then recommend a few more devs, and add another layer of management, and so on. I saw 3 projects suffer this type of infection, and they all suffered for it.
That's what they started out as (actually, as a spinoff of Arthur Andersen, so both management consulting and IT consulting). Nowadays, most of their business is outsourcing. Companies will outsource the maintenance/support of entire applications to them (like take over a company's billing system and be responsible for keeping it running and making ongoing enhancements) or an entire business process (like Accounts Payable). Typically they "rebadge" the client's employees as Accenture employees, charge the client X% less than what the client is paying to do it themselves, and then reduce headcount, offshore some work, automate some functions, etc. in order to run a profit.
Source: I work for a large consulting firm that competes with them.
I've just had the 'pleasure' of being party to some of their 'SEO' advice (to a large global pharma company, who was paying them $$$ p/h).
That's why they have so many employees, that's literally their "stock".
Wait, so their projections stayed almost the same? Just 1 point less off the top end?
1% lowered revenue growth (which I know isn't what you meant) would mean slightly-less-than-0.01% lower total revenue.
So someone calculated this wrong or had unrealistic expectations and the employees will pay for it.
I've got a few buddies working in huge consulting firms, they can spend weeks or months on the bench waiting for an appropriate projects to come up.
It’s always the amount of work available
That said, Accenture is like most of the big consulting & outsourcing firms in having a stack ranking review process that encourages low performers to leave.
I was under the impression that flexibility was one of the big reasons for TVC use, much easier to scale up or down, akin to cloud computing resources.
I suppose the lack of TVC scale-down at companies like Google is yet another indication that layoffs aren't a financial necessity or even a best practice; it's just the hot market signal to show investors that you're serious about "battening down the hatches" for "economic downturn."
> I was under the impression that flexibility was one of the big reasons for TVC use, much easier to scale up or down, akin to cloud computing resources.
I think many companies use them for flexibility, but my impression is that social media companies (of which Google is one) have other reasons, such as protecting their FTEs from the soul-killing aspects of content moderation.
That was also when the whole "let's unionize google contractors" thing started happening.
They do all the time with simply not renewing contracts. TVC are also generally assigned to support a product or group of devs so they typically come and go with the product.
Also, employees in the USA can be very expensive because of company benefits (mostly health care) costs.
Finally, it is not unusual for employees to be less motivated and/or capable than contractors.
I've been at a few places where employees where dropped before contractors...
The reason they are used is for tasks that are repetitive, or with no career progression, or that may not be needed long term. Your comment about cost is correct as well.
That's kind of the whole point of hiring TVCs, though my impression was Accenture was always aimed more at non-Tech F1000s.
I think the FAANG companies used Adecco and smaller local staff augmentation companies to their TVCs.
https://www.henricodolfing.com/2019/10/case-study-hertz-acce...?
https://www.digitalhealth.net/2021/05/nhs-digital-denies-con...
Things like this are way too common these days and not only with software, I have seen it myself may times. If I were a CEO (I far from it), I would make sure that the contract states exactly what is needed plus cost recovery if delayed more than 6 months.
edit: typos
That initially sounds incredibly shady, however it's not infrequent for projects to fail for reasons outside the contractor's control. Maybe the client can't make up their mind as to what they want, or internal politics mean funding gets cut for the project and it's terminated halfway through. Big contractors absolutely will sign a contract with clauses around deliverables and timelines, but they'll also refer every little deviation from what's listed in that contract to a change control committee to ensure it's accounted for, and doesn't come back to bite them in the ass.
Mostly you don't want to run a project like that, because as you work through the implementation you find variations from what was originally documented, or new edge cases that need dealing with. In many cases you're better off taking the risk of overspend or overrun than ending up with some software that perfectly fulfils a set of requirements that don't reflect reality.
Having used this particular one in the past. You want to have your details in order before you build anything (waterfall). But at that point you might as well make it yourself in house. But you are already committed to it (sunk cost).
It is great for middle managers who want to still 'code', but not really, but want to be architects. They get a 'cheap' team and maybe look like they are still doing things. I personally got the leftovers of that on a few projects when the manager realized it was basically a double time job to manage his own team and the offshore one too. The manager will get bored with it or overwhelmed by it and realize 'oh wait I need 3 of my devs and 2 PMs to manage this bad boy'.
If you think you have the 'they will build the right thing' kind of guys you need to test for that. Even then a 'good shop' can turn into something else later on as they switch people in and out on you.
> Even then a 'good shop' can turn into something else later on as they switch people in and out on you.
YES! Those super talented consultants are in high demand for new deals. They often lead the charge on the proposal, initial project work and early conversations with the client, but may rotate off to focus on landing a new opportunity.
source: former Accenture employee
(2) "Accenture ... would cut ... 19,000 jobs" is in the first paragraph
(3) you can tell from op's profile that english isn't a first language
so what's really going on here
OK, but the actual title is... in the title itself. I think the bigger question is, why did OP feel the need to make this edit? HN guidelines state "...please use the original title, unless it is misleading or linkbait; don't editorialize." [1]
> you know exactly what they mean
I didn't, at least not when I first read the headline. As mentioned in other comments, the use of "would" implies a condition, i.e. "Accenture would cut 19k jobs if ____ (some condition were met)." In grammar, it's called the 2nd conditional. [2] That's how "would" is normally used in this context. And if we assume that OP followed the HN guidelines, we'll assume that's what the article is about.
As it turns out, that's not what the article actually says. In this case, I had to click into the article to find that out. By itself, that's only a few wasted seconds. Not a huge deal, but it's not exactly a good thing either. More broadly, if we don't call this kind of thing out when it happens, it will tend to happen more often, and that will affect the user experience of this site.
Maintaining a minimum standard of grammar in headlines is one of the ways we keep this site usable. If English isn't OP's first language, maybe they should be more careful with English-language edits. I don't think that's asking too much.
1. https://news.ycombinator.com/newsguidelines.html
2. https://www.perfect-english-grammar.com/second-conditional.h...
https://english.stackexchange.com/questions/222166/which-dia...
op meant to say "will", which would have made for a less ambiguous title. but confusing that with "would" is a common mistake, and it's especially forgivable since "would" was used in the introductory paragraph in a way that appears non-conditional
i don't think a simple translation error warrants a bunch of slippery-sloping about The Rules and telling them "if your English isn't perfect, maybe work on that before posting here"
That isn't what I said, is it? I welcome their posts. But if English isn't their first language, maybe they should trust the English-language abilities of the journalist who wrote the headline, rather than thinking they know better or trying to editorialize.
> it can be argued the title of the article on reuters is misleading or inaccurate, because the cuts are not complete
That's not necessarily true. News headlines have a number of grammatical idiosyncracies, of which the use of present-tense to refer to past (or future) actions is one. [1] They're kind of a grammatical minefield, which is all the more reason to trust the original headline author instead of editorializing.
1. https://archive.nytimes.com/www.nytimes.com/learning/general...
Serious question- how is this ignorant? I genuinely don't see how that follows from what I said, since nothing in my comment implies that Indians have inherently inferior English-language communication skills, or that Indian-English is somehow inferior to the vernacular I use. It simply states that one individual (i.e. OP) should have trusted the abilities of another individual (Chavi Mehta, the journalist).
> both OP and the journalist are Indian
I really don't see how the journalist's ethnicity is relevant, and I'd love some clarification on why you do. Regardless of where they're from, they were hired by Reuters, a news outlet which publishes content in English. I'd be willing to bet that they were vetted for this job at least in part on their ability to write in the vernacular used by Reuters. OP had no reason to doubt the effectiveness of that process, and should therefore have "trusted the English-language abilities of the journalist...", as I said.
OP themself was a bit ignorant (of the HN guidelines, not in the sense that you mean) when they edited the headline. It's also a bit arrogant for them to assume they're better at crafting headlines than the entire team responsible for publishing the story (the journalist, their editor, the Reuters proofreaders, etc.).
All that said, I've already invested way more effort into this conversation than is warranted by OP's (relatively minor) faux pas. I decline to continue participating.
I’m not sure how implying English is not their first language does not call English language communication skills into question. Incidentally, you are likely correct, as very few Indians speak English as a first language.
> I really don't see how the journalist's ethnicity is relevant, and I'd love some clarification on why you do.
Ethnicity is not relevant, cultural context is. Likely neither OP nor the journalist speak English as a first language.
> It's also a bit arrogant for them to assume they're better at crafting headlines than the entire team responsible for publishing the story
Reuters is a news agency. Their headlines are supposed to be uneditorialised almost by definition. It’s not about being “better at crafting headlines”, it’s about adding an editorial slant to a neutral headline. I agree that it was the wrong thing to do, but news outlets the world over will “craft” different headlines for this story based on the same wire story.
> I decline to continue participating.
OK.
In any case, it still doesn't explain the intent behind editing the original title. I would argue that "this headline needs more quaintness" is not a valid reason to editorialize here.
> Otherwise please use the original title, unless it is misleading or linkbait; don't editorialize.
I don't think not knowing enough English is a good reason to ignore the site guidelines.
I haven't checked OP's profile, and we don't need to to talk about this. I want OP to feel welcome here, and that isn't incompatible with talking about clarity and keeping original article titles.
you tell me
I'm not yet accustomed to the fact that some people see the equivalent of a city being laid off as a favorable signal.
No one thinks it's an ethically good thing to do, or that the human lives affected by it are irrelevant. The direction of their stock is almost completely divorced from those kinds of questions, and is instead a purely financial judgement.
It's good to be somewhat confused by that state of affairs, otherwise you'll mistake wealth or popularity for goodness or rightness. We need to be careful to structure the our society and the means to change our culture such that we don't systemically bias it towards unfavorable outcomes that might be more successful in a more ruthless environment.
That said, I'm not a fan of corporate behemoths using humans as an elastic resource or ballast they can throw away at the first sign of problems. This isn't a mom and pop that can't keep paying an employee during hard times but a public company keeping their year-to-year indicators looking pretty.
> Otherwise please use the original title, unless it is misleading or linkbait; don't editorialize.
Because of their metrics being directly correlated with headcount they need to hire. Probably they will be hiding their offshoring behind the general lay off environment and is not comparable with the reasons for the tech sectors layoffs.
In the grand scheme of things it is not a large number for the size of the company but it would be a good number for a moderate offshore hiring spree.
Their employee churn is a lot larger.
0 - https://otp.tools.investis.com/clients/us/accenture2/SEC/sec...
I understand sales, delivery, etc. Dev is software development teams? So I presume back office excludes software development teams? Any concrete examples of teams that belong to back office?
The next best alternative is to express it in terms of a % of total employees. Better yet would be to compare the # of employees over time (possibly expressed as a proportion of some business metric such as revenue). Is this just a reversion to the mean? And is such reversion because they over-hired or because their revenue growth has meaningfully slowed?
But real useful insight would also require comparing this to other companies, including smaller ones. Just as bad as, or possibly worse than, Accenture cutting 19,000 jobs—some single digit percentage of its employees—would be to have thousands of companies cut, say, 20% of their staff.
There's a lot of availability bias in just plotting absolute layoff numbers from Big Tech and other large cap businesses.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Accenture
They went on a buying spree over the past 3 years. I wonder if they are using this financial environment to get rid of people that came with these purchases.
With no end in sight, how many more laid off devs can the industry really support?
The second paragraph in the article.
Who said there's no end in sight? Are you saying layoffs will continue indefinitely until there are zero software developers in the world?
>how many more laid off devs can the industry really support?
How many millions of developers are there (according to the 2020 Developer Survey by Stack Overflow, there were over 60 million developers worldwide)? What fraction of this is 170k, and how many will be rehired just as part of normal hiring?
> More than half of the layoffs will affect staff at its non-billable corporate functions
So presumably a lot (most?) of these laid off individuals are not devs
This really isn't news except for the people affected