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Comment by virtuosarmo | Hacker News Reader

According to an article in the Financial Times (gated), more than half the cuts would be coming in corporate functions (i.e. back office) and not client-facing roles (i.e. sales, delivery, dev, etc.). https://www.ft.com/content/346357fd-4fb5-4794-9706-807eaf767...

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Laying off people who are billing clients would be ridiculous because that’s where the money comes from. I suspect the bench (consultants in the firm looking for billable work) is very deep and costly right now so if there are any cuts to the people who actually make money it will be the bench.

You can also find that information on page 23 of their quarterly filing with the SEC [0]

0 - https://otp.tools.investis.com/clients/us/accenture2/SEC/sec...

For people like me who are not very familiar with some of these corporate terms, can someone explain exactly what "back office" means? Is it IT?

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?

I think back office is just a generic term for non customer facing positions, usually supporting internal operations in a corporate environment, not a specific department or function. So a software developer could be back office depending on context.

Finance, Human Resources, Internal IT, Recruiting, Facilities, etc. Any role that the customer is not directly interfacing with or paying for.

“Back office “ in this case means employees who are not billing clients and therefore do not bring any money to the firm. In consulting you have to be billable at a rate a certain percentage above your cost based on your level in the firm. High level people have to bill a lot more than they cost to maintain their target margin. If you’re not billing then you only cost money. There’s no other revenue source in consulting than billing time to a client.

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