| Not really. Mostly (when I was pimped out to them) they did almost exclusively "business constantly" work (read: outsourcing blame and repaying favours, greasing the revolving door, putting projects on a project code with an existing vendor instead of hiring staff who come out of the overall budget etc etc), they made tech stuff something to "throw in" as a bonus to some deals. Started out with reporting (remember crystal reports and oracle appex?) but that grows with kickbacks until they're subcontracting Fujitsu or CapGemini to manage desktops as part of a deal. After a while the tech bit ended up being one of the biggest money makers they had, thanks to clever/corrupt SLA's which enabled them to have terrible staff who got paid nothing, and pocket the difference. They had an nice/huge domino setup in the 2000's though(sol/sparc), and some of the excel macros the audit folks wrote and used allowed me to grow up from thinking that working ksh perl and c made me "better" than the windows folks. They would share these 10mb+ packages of excel macros which were all compressed text, they extremely complicated and also controlled by various regulatory bodies, it was harder than most of the code we were writing for their backends... Tl;dr -- nope, but if you ever see how some serious financial auditors code, you might stop dismissing the MS crowd so readily. |
Thanks for sharing your memories. Having known some people on the business side of PWC I'm not surprised, but I am amused.