[sqldba]

The company is unethical garbage that relies on customer management being too lazy to sue them for not completing contracts.

They lie and treat their employees like garbage.

And their employee technical skill is typically less than a warm body from the street. Less than a dead body from the street.

I still feel sad for the people who lost their jobs. They know who they’re working for though.

[bmj]

I can confirm this. My employer brought in several teams from Accenture to push through some new tech initiatives, and every one of them is basically a dumpster fire. I was doing code reviews for one of the teams, and nearly every commit would be sent back with multiple findings. Some of these commits were literally minor UI updates that someone with a few hours of Udemy HTML/CSS training could do without issues.

[Cthulhu_]

Things like that rely on a small percentage of competent developers and an army of padding to get more bodies on seats.

And the problem is, the companies hiring them don't seem to care.

[bmj]

Yep. The executives at my employer realized the consultants were "underperforming" and cut their contracts, but this just left the in-house teams stuck with fixing or rewriting the Accenture code, piled on top of their current project work.

[commandlinefan]

> stuck with fixing or rewriting

Yep, can't just throw out this garbage that doesn't work, have to keep because "we paid for it already".

[908B64B197]

There's a whole industry here in America that re-shores programming contracts. They know they can't underbid Indian/foreign body shops so they just wait a few months and call back the companies who went with cheaper programmers. If the company is still around it's generally a complete re-write.

[cgeier]

Can't confirm that, at least not in general. Worked along some accenture people for some time and most were a) very happy at their job b) more competent than the average tech worker.

[bitcharmer]

Yup, working for a big telco where they were a leading software services provider there was this insider joke that when their software inevitably crashes and burns and the client complains, they'll just have their lawyers respond with: but there was no requirement the software should work. And they'd happily accept insanely expensive change requests to fix their own bugs.

Accenture is a scam

[cvhashim04]

That’s unfortunate.

I’ve worked with consultants from Accenture a few times. All seemed technically competent and excelled in their roles.

[Kon-Peki]

You'll start with competent consultants; they will slowly rotate in new consultants with less competency for as long as you let them, until they are all useless at anything other than talking confidently.

You've worked for companies with halfway decent management. Unfortunately, that's not universal.

Think about if from the perspective of the consulting firm. They are charging $X per hour and paying their staff $Y per hour. Profit is $X-$Y, and their incentive is to maximize the delta. If you let them continue to increase the delta, why wouldn't they?

[foobiekr]

What did they deliver?

The other two posters perfectly describe the Accenture experience (terrible) so I am curious.

My direct experience is that they send high quality technical architects to get the deal done and the moment that happens those architects vanish and they back up the school bus and send in an army of zero competence low experience drones who are barely functional.

And that’s a good outcome compared to the offshore variant.

[bmj]

My direct experience is that they send high quality technical architects to get the deal done and the moment that happens those architects vanish and they back up the school bus and send in an army of zero competence low experience drones who are barely functional.

This is also my experience. Accenture was given several high value projects, and their technical architects made it seem like they had the knowledge and skills to deliver. When I spoke to one of the in-house engineers a few months later, he said the consultants had yet to deliver anything of value, and the on-going planning made it seem like the team from Accenture actually doing the work didn't even fully understand the project.

On my own project, the Accenture team took nearly an entire program increment to deliver a clearly dysfunctional plan for implementing a progressive web app based on one of our products. They submitted an MR for the plan, and after the number of review comments reached 50, they just moved on to other things.

I am sure there are some good consultants at Accenture. I just haven't worked with them.

[VBprogrammer]

We do a fairly simple technical interview using replit to complete some python tasks, most of which chat GPT can complete instantly.

The number of people who come from these large contracting type companies who can't complete the first set of questions is alarming.

[purpleturtle22]

chatGPT can do Leetcode hards, so not a very good litmus test fwiw

[nsxwolf]

Maybe they should use ChatGPT

[Cthulhu_]

That's likely what will be happening, so it's going to end up being a live coding exercise or monitored.

[commandlinefan]

> They lie and treat their employees like garbage.

Their customers, too.