Sounds like a lot, but apparently they have 738k employees, up from 275k a decade ago, which seems just wild to me. (I don't have a clear idea of what they even do. IT consulting firm?)
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.
https://www.nytimes.com/2021/08/31/technology/facebook-accen...
I worked a lot with Accenture, enterprise context.
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.
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.
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?
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.
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.
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.
So everyone has to earn at least below 50k?
I mean overhead cost, building rents and c level salaries?!
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/...
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.
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.
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".