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Comment by DarkNova6 | Hacker News Reader

Left Accenture this year and I don't regret it. Their leadership is non-existant, their management bloated and there is no vision whatsoever. The company just pumps back money into stock-buybacks and nobody can explain why the CEO, July Sweet, is still on top of it (spoiler, her husband works in politics).

Talent is leaving the company left and right because promotions and salary adjustments just are not happening. Your achievements don't matter because they already skipped promotions for 2 years, so there are dozens of people in front of the queue.

Juniors are getting fired if they don't have a project for 3 months, but once a surge of projects come around, there is not enough manpower to do staffing. Meanwhile, people in management are safe and get large severance packages.

Edit: Hi to my formers colleagues. I know you are reading this, feel free to disagree ;-)

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> Juniors are getting fired if they don't have a project for 3 months

When I worked for Accenture, I got benched for an entire summer. It was great. At the time the only resource to find a new project was this spreadsheet uploaded to Sharepoint, and there was 0 pressure from my HR rep to actually look for a new role.

I eventually found a new job and quit, but I always wondered what would have happened if I just stayed on the bench while working at the 2nd job.

I'm sorry, what? I run an agency (still figuring the space out), but just so I get that part: They asked a junior to "find a project" from a spreadsheet?

Don't they pair juniors up with seniors in existing projects? Before I'd "bench" anyone, I'd do that without charging for them, so they learn and can do realised billable hours later down the line. I'd feel so weird getting benched. I didn't know that was a thing anyone did frankly.

Benching is very common in any firm like Accenture, yea.

It does seem weird from the outside I agree. It can also depend on the person, skillset, etc. Some people will never get benched just because they don't have any or enough other people with equivalent skills, so there's constant demand.

(edit: skillset, not skillet, obviously your bench rate does not depend on your cookware)

My experience was 25 years ago, but back then we analysts and consultants were making around 50-60K and they were charging clients 5-15 times that when we were staffed. So I'm sure having a good buffer of people waiting and ready to go was well worth it.

Even during the dotcom crash, they didn't lay anyone off IIRC. Instead they offered up to a couple years unpaid leave with benefits and guarantees of a job afterwards.

I always viewed Accenture's main business was signing contracts, second to delivering a good product.

I figured, they couldn't sign a contract without having people ready to staff it. I met a ton of people who were hired onto the bench and sat for months either without a project (just because they had skills that would be needed for future projects), or they had a project but were waiting for the project to start.

I say second to delivering a good project: My job was application support. Half of my team was offshore, and they had very little actual technical skill, they just learned the problems that may occur with the software we supported. But they couldn't go off script and debug problems that we didn't already know how to solve.

Oh, absolutely. The only real career path they have terminates at partner, which is basically sales. There is formally an option to stay technical, but people will look at you funny and you're not going to grow or get paid much compared to an actual tech company.

You can't do that in most projects without breaking security guidelines.

There are contracts signed and NDAs for everyone that has access to customer systems.

Although I also do conceed many offshoring companies forget about that, until someone that wasn't supposed to exist on the project does something that ends up on an escalation.

It is very common in consulting and agencies, when not getting enough projects.

How long was that ago? I haven't seen any spreadsheet like this, but the internal tools aren't exactly the best (Accenture is too expensive to work for Accenture, haha).

But the bench also provided great opportunities to do actual good trainings, certifications and upskilling of all kinds. But the company stopped investing into its future long ago. It's just about short term gains for those on top.

> but the internal tools aren't exactly the best (Accenture is too expensive to work for Accenture, haha).

I've always found this part to be so crazy. It's seems like both a politically bad idea to not dogfood your own stuff and just also a bad business sense to not get "free" testers using the products.

Like, if you're buying a car and you ask the salesman which of these Subaru's they'd be and they respond with I'd go elsewhere and buy a Ford. Why would you buy one of their cars?

I have done several projects for Ford, one measure of the status of their employees was how many trial Ford cars they got at any one time, the most senior people that I knew were on three.

Having worked for a company of a similar profile, I can perhaps explain: the only folks working on internal tools are those who are so weak that they can’t be placed on a customer account as a billable resource… which is not a particularly high bar.

> How long was that ago?

2009

> But the bench also provided great opportunities to do actual good trainings, certifications and upskilling of all kinds.

I did spend some of the time studying new developer skills. But on my own, Accenture didn't have any learning resources for that all they had was all management training stuff.

I worked at a place that was not dissimilar internally to Accenture, I find the "Juniors are getting fired if they don't have a project for 3 months," quite generous. You had a max of about 2 weeks where I worked, no matter your seniority. You could use PTO to stretch it out & then use internal re-training to stretch that quite a bit since we had approximately 40 hours of annual retraining that could be done 6 months early if needed. But after that, you got met by security at the door & your severance offer handed to you.

I get that you can’t subsidize people without work. But at from what I saw, good juniors got sacked and bad managers were kept. I take that personal and it is one of the reasons I left.

God, I love this kind of hot take. It fills in the blanks that the website’s design leaves out.

I'm not even being provocative, it's just the facts. If you want a hot take it would be that:

The only reason the current management is still in place is because the CEO's husband is in politics and institutional investors want to keep their allies in place. In turn, Accenture keeps their friends happy by syphoning money from the bottom to the top, at the cost of their own consultancy and delivery capabilities. Meanwhile, the C-suit cashes out big-time.

The CEO is fundamentally incapable of changing even a light bulb, let alone address strategic problems. As a lawyer and Harvard MBA, she provided "growth" by buying shitty IT-companies where key-experts left the company immediately. She doesn't have the knowledge or intellectual capability or create "value" or "operational efficiency". Instead, they chase trends and make one terrible decision after another. This burns money faster than a conveyor belt can transport into a furnace (like selling off most offices during covid at low prices and having to buy new ones when prices are up).

> the CEO's husband is a democrat

Perhaps my Google-fu is dying, but isn't this the CEO's husband?

https://ballotpedia.org/Chad_Sweet

> Chad Sweet is a Republican political consultant based in Washington, D.C., and co-founder of the Chertoff Group, a business and security consulting firm.

> Sweet was the campaign chairman for Ted Cruz's 2016 presidential campaign and worked for the Central Intelligence Agency, several financial institutions, Department of Homeland Security, and the Texas Lyceum. In 2012, Sweet served as finance chairman for Cruz's Senate campaign.

what's the saying about every accusation being projection?

Thanks for fact-checking, I appreciate it. People inside the company told me he's a democrat and should have double checked myself. Thanks for pointing that out.

I hereby call for a forum that is exclusively verified current and former employees of big companies spilling the tea like this.

Lol just go to r/accenture. Compared to those guys this is mild. Reddit is the place where employees refer to their company and CEO in the most vivid and colorful of ways.

I doubt it's her husband. She's more powerful than he is.

"Former" CIA

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