
My life in Accenture before startups - swombat
http://swombat.com/2011/6/7/accenture-before-startups
======
cubicle67
I spent a number of years working as an employee of one of the big IT
outsourcers on a Australian government department (better not say which one)
contract. During this time I was required to assist a team from Accenture who
had won a contract to write some software that needed to be integrated with a
number of systems.

Accenture had "all their best people" on the job. This meant almost an entire
floor of staff; managers, project managers, BAs, god knows what else. Oh, they
also had two young devs, you know, to actually do the work. These two guys
were nice, seemed pretty smart, but fresh out of uni had no experience at all
and were just so far out of their depth it was embracing. I tried to help them
where I could, but didn't get much opportunity.

Accenture originally gave a timeframe of three years for this project, but
when I left they were two years in and still not even a working demo in sight.
I have no idea if it was ever completed or what happened

~~~
mason55
_> Accenture had "all their best people" on the job. This meant almost an
entire floor of staff; managers, project managers, BAs, god knows what else.
Oh, they also had two young devs, you know, to actually do the work._

As a dev/architect in Professional Services (not at a big 5 consulting firm),
this is way off the mark. PMs and BAs do a ton of work that I either would not
want to do or am not good at and while the end product is a bundle of code
there is a LOT of work that goes into building it outside of straight
development.

~~~
cubicle67
I tend to write in a hyperbolic way to accentuate the point I'm trying to
make. Obviously the BAs et al do a lot of work, but I was trying to contrast
the number of non-developers to developers (yes, there were only 2).

I should note that my opinion of BAs is not very high, based solely on the
dozen or so I've had to work with. The job sounds worthwhile, and I'm sure
there's excellent BAs out there, but the company I used to work for didn't
employ any of them (or perhaps the culture was such that the good ones left)

------
fbnt
I left Accenture (Italy) this january, after 3 years, and just like you I was
hired right after graduation thanks to my 'mad' java skills, after about 1
year I wasn't writing much code anymore and SQL, Word & Excel became my only
daily companions.

 _Negatives/things I didn't like during my experience in Accenture_ :

    
    
      - Working 10-14 hours a day (^). If you were to leave at 6pm your supervisor 
      would joke about it ("hey, did you get that part-time thing?").
      It's alienating and can be done only if you're young & single. 
      You are supposed to immolate yourself for the company.
    
      - Procedures & timetables to fill: I were required to follow the 
      most cumbersome procedures even for the simplier tasks and file every 
      single small detail of what I've done in a form somewhere for monitoring 
      purposes. 
      While this is a good practice in general, what was going on there 
      was beyond absurdity. I spent more time reporting what I was doing 
      than working on the actual task.
    
      - Dressing code = compulsory business attire, Suite + tie (!)
    
      - Managers overlydramatic speeches. Laughable attitude.
    
      - Strong pyramidal scheme. If your non-technical supervisor closed a deal 
      with the client on a specific feature, it didn't matter if it was technically 
      unfeasible and risked to put in jeopardy the whole system, you were -ordered- 
      to do it. obey. Reworking was then very common.
    
      - What matter isn't the quality of your work, it's the amount of time 
      you spend on it. You're consultants and your company charges the client by 
      the hours you do. The more you stay in the office, the better is for the company. 
      Optimization? who cares.
    
      - Most of my coworkers there were really, really, really bored. 
      Their life was sucked into the office, and the only thought they had on a 
      typical monday morning was how to make it through the next weekend.
    

_Positives_ :

    
    
      - I found some truly talented people, and I learned lots of both technical 
      and people skills.
    
      - You get to learn some self-discipline, especially when it comes to schedule 
      your time to reach specific goals.
    
      - On a professional point of view, I grew up a lot, it's a good 'gym', 
      an eye-opener.
    

Anyway, in all honesty, I'm glad I've been working there and I do not regret
it at all. If I were to run a startup right after university, I would have bit
off more than I could chew, probably.

(^) I don't mind working 10-14 on my own stuff, things that I'm crafting with
my hands and that I find exciting. Pretending to work 14 hours on a bi-monthly
report just because you've got to leave at the same time as everybody else is
another thing.

~~~
arethuza
"What matter isn't the quality of your work, it's the amount of time you spend
on it."

So what is the motivation for employing good developers then? If you make more
money by taking longer then the sensible thing to do would be to hire _less_
skilled people who talked a good game but were poor at actually doing stuff.

~~~
drtse4
The problem here is that considering how these consulting companies are
structured, how they work and their size, the capability to hire good
developers imho is not even there.

Also, are companies like Accenture chosen by their clients for the incredible
quality of their work? I'm also from Italy, so i could have observed something
peculiar to this market, but the clients of those big consulting corps
(usually from the financial sector or similar) just pick one of the biggest
players as a "safe" bet, technical considerations are not part of the
decision.

Which big player do they choose and why? I remember a discussion here on HN
about "golf course software", that could be the methodology.

~~~
gaius
Client pay for _predictably_ mediocre. It's a scale: pay $X and get Y%
probability of the project being done by D date. Of course they don't even get
that; in practice, Accenture are as unpredictable as any large-scale software
development effort. So rather than mediocre yet safe, you get mediocre, _and_
late, _and_ over budget. LOLZ on you! Or on your poor shareholders/taxpayers
more like.

~~~
tsotha
When I dealt with Accenture (back when they were Anderson Consulting), they
were quite predictable - always late, always over budget, and always producing
an unmaintainable mess.

The developers were good or bad in about the same percentages as other
companies, but the management structure was designed to suck money out of the
client. Work product was secondary (or, whatever) and it showed.

------
localtalent
My story is nearly identical (US, NY). I left after 5 years. No kool-aid
drinking here.

Accenture is a culture you either fit into or you don't - a very 'up-or-out'
mentality.

Some of the problems that commenters have noted are definitely attributed to
the internal culture: an over-emphasis on face-time, long hours with no real
work to do, and occasionally selling work that was undeliverable (technically
unfeasible, impossible delivery schedule, etc).

Some management was good, a lot of it was poor, and generally the focus was on
selling and looking good rather than delivering a viable product. At all
levels, you're ranked against your co-workers for a very small number of
promotion slots, particularly in recent times. This creates a strange dynamic:
you're both trying to work with people at your level to create something
useful for a client and prove that you're better/smarter/faster than your
peers, some of whom are on the same project and most of whom you've never met.

Many of the complaints, however, are an effect of having large numbers of
stakeholders on a complicated project. Clients are often unpredictable, and
incented by a completely different set of goals. There's generally a lot of
money and a lot of management involved, and people have their careers staked
on these projects - disagreement is normal. Rework was extremely common due to
constant spec changes, and I had to go to bat for my developers numerous
times.

It's not a great work environment. Low and mid level people are generally
dropped into a project with no background and the client has been told that
they're experts on whatever giant, 30-year-old legacy system that the client
is running. They fake it and learn on the job. There's often a hostile
reception from the client employees - the perception is that you're a highly
paid consultant coming to take their job or fire them. Travel is the norm, and
you're expected to work long hours since you aren't going home to a family -
just a generic hotel room.

Ultimately, what drove me out was the lack of interesting and rewarding work,
the internal politics, and the isolation. Wish I had left sooner, but I hadn't
figured out what I wanted.

------
ben1040
A few years ago I quit my job in academia to go work as a field delivery
consultant for a large ERP firm. This whole thing was a ridiculous culture
shock to me. I quit because I wanted to try something different -- it was
different, all right.

For the first year or so I was doing some development work on the client side
as well as requirements gathering and dealing with integration. I was cool
with this, because I was doing something technical but wanted something that
would flex my people skills as well.

At one point I was tasked with requirements gathering for a customer who
wanted some custom work done to their installation of our product. They bought
two weeks of my time to draft a spec, and no development -- my deliverable was
basically to draft the SOW for the next consultant who was to write a
technical design for someone else who was to write code.

I finished the spec, in spite of a client who really was extremely hard to
deal with. The client sat on it for a few months and decided they wanted to
revisit the issue, so I got on a plane again and spent two more weeks trying
to tease some answers out of them so I could revise things.

The final specification amounted to approximately 95 pages including
screenshot mockups. The spec went back to the home office, where our
development team reviewed it and quoted something like three or four months'
time to develop it, test it, and hand off back to the customer for acceptance
testing. They planned for the invariable back and forth on that as well. This
was in February of that particular year; they were looking at taking the
feature live on January 1 of the following year.

The feature they requested? Four simple web forms, the code to validate their
input, and a report generator to dump back out what was put into the form.

After we finalized the spec for this I turned in my two weeks and went
straight back to academia, where four web forms and a report is something you
write, wrap automated tests around, and deploy before lunchtime.

~~~
r00fus
> he feature they requested? Four simple web forms, the code to validate their
> input, and a report generator to dump back out what was put into the form.
> After we finalized the spec for this I turned in my two weeks and went
> straight back to academia, where four web forms and a report is something
> you write, wrap automated tests around, and deploy before lunchtime.

I think this is a very uneven comparison. Comparing what a decent coder _can
do_ as to what is spec'd, negotiated and sold is wildly different.

At the heart of the problem is that consulting agencies and ISVs like
Accenture benefit from more "work" being done, so they sell more "work". The
product delivered is a consequence.

------
wallflower
I know a few friends who worked for Accenture (back when it was called
Andersen Consulting). I always thought the most fascinating thing (aside from
the instant credibility of having the company on your resume) was their
training program which was designed to take mostly liberal arts majors and
teach them C programming (with unknown long-term success but at least enough
to not totally drown at a first client engagement). The training program was
very intensive and immersive, and I wonder what became of it and if the basic
principles of the program could be applied to retraining willing liberal arts
graduates.

~~~
drtse4
That was one of the reasons why i politely declined when i was asked if i was
interested in a interview for the consulting branch. A place where people with
zero experience are hired, trained in a few weeks and them sent to some client
as a "consultant"? No, thanks...

~~~
gamble
This is what I love about consulting companies. They get the contract by
talking up their experience with the client's business, but once the deal is
signed they just scoop a bunch of warm bodies off the street to do the actual
work.

~~~
swombat
Not a single one of the projects I worked on or was directly aware of, in 4
years, ever used a subcontractor.

That's anecdotal evidence, but it should clarify that though it no doubt
happens (and happened more before there was a Solutions Workforce), it's by no
means the norm to hire subcontractors to "do the real work".

~~~
gamble
I'm not talking about subcontractors. Most consultancies, including Accenture
in my limited personal experience with them, staff up with new hires
(preferably cheap new grads) whenever they get a new contract. When business
slows down enough that people are lingering on the bench, they get fired. They
are essentially high-end temp agencies.

~~~
swombat
Nope. When business gets slow, they fire the experienced people, who are much
more expensive to keep around idle.

~~~
ryanhuff
True. That is the "up or out" model at work. The few that survive such
attrition are partner material, meaning they can put up with the lifestyle,
enjoy the role of digging through other peoples business, and have potential
as sales people.

------
kitsune_
My experience (off and on-work) with Accenture was horrible.

A small anecdote (out of many):

I visited a good friend of mine, a true math and programming genius, who was
in the middle of his PhD at the ETHZ. An acquaintance of my friend started to
tell bullshit stories about his "heroic" job at Accenture. An untalented money
whore if I ever saw one. If you know nothing and have the moral integrity of a
human trafficker, it looks like you end up in consulting @ Accenture.

Buzzwords. Check. "Play the game or get lost" mantras. Check. "People making
less than 100k are lazy bastards". Check. "All companies are rotting from
within, our external consulting work is basically a gift of god". Check. Blah
blah blah. He got a hard on from riling us up, the "naive idealists" we are.

Get real, son.

~~~
swombat
Any company with 100k+ people is going to have its share of idiots. I worked
there for 4 years and, in my experience, this type of person was definitely a
very small minority.

I'd blame the person rather than the company for this kind of terribly flawed
character.

~~~
mbesto
Agreed that any company is going to have it's share of idiots, but isn't it
the principle job of a company like Accenture to hire competent people? Their
business model is to lease out intellectual talent so their principle job is
to create talent.

I, like most people commenting here, have worked with a lot of bad Accenture
people and am shocked when I do actually meet a good one. Yes, they do exist,
but most good people don't stay long (much like yourself) because they realize
opportunities outside of Accenture are much more lucrative.

Also, their model is fairly obvious now (like other big 4) - huge margins on
Jr Consultants that are lead by competent seniors. When the senior people are
incompetent and the juniors are not fast learners then the whole model is
broken and thus the assumption that "everyone is idiots".

~~~
quicksilver03
No, theyre only interested in hiring billable people. They're not interested
in creating talent or nurturing competencies, they provide numbers (or better,
warm bodies to fill the client's chairs) and often subcontract to smaller
consultancies when truly competent people are needed on some project.

~~~
drtse4
The subcontracting thing alone should be enough to never have anything to do
with a company that does it, but usually the clients don't even know/suspect.

Edit: What about the downvotes? is subcontracting a good thing for the client
(or for the small consultancies, that could become completely dependent on the
contracts from the big players) or something that should be encouraged?

------
binarymax
I can vouch for this. I never worked for any of the big 4, but worked with
them on many occasions, when I was a consultant with a much smaller firm (<50
employees when I started, >200 when I left).

Consulting really is a great way to learn the ins and outs of business while
earning a good salary and getting to travel. Combine it with writing lots of
code and its a fantastic real-world education for a multitude of endeavors.

~~~
hugh3
When you put it that way, it sounds exciting.

Sometimes I wish the world had forced me to go and do other things in between
my undergrad and my PhD. Once you're on an academic career track it's hard to
take a few years off to do something else.

~~~
Lewisham
You should make sure you get an internship.

I hated school by the time I had my undergraduate CS degree. I took two years
in industry, realized I hated it far more than I could have ever imagined, now
I am very happy in a PhD program. You need to work to get the perspective (and
also to find the useful problems to solve).

------
edw519
My typical day working for a Big 5 firm:

    
    
       7:00 - drive to client in Redlands
       8:00 - arrive in Redlands
       8:42 - client arrives for 8:00 meeting
       8:51 - client leaves for emergency
       8:52 - review project with programmer - still 18 months behind
       9:15 - daily email to 6 bosses about dire status
       9:38 - take call from boss #4 - debate "strategic direction"
      10:20 - coffee, snack, & bitch session with lead programmer
      10:45 - drive to client in Century City
      12:20 - arrive in Century City, everyone at lunch already
      12:30 - have hot dog at sidewalk cafe, look for Christina Applegate
       1:15 - meet with client for daily status
       1:22 - client leaves for emergency
       1:28 - review project with programmer - still 18 months behind
       1:40 - daily email to 5 other bosses about dire status
       2:15 - take call from other boss #3 - debate "strategic direction"
       2:28 - referee dispute between contract & employee programmers
       3:20 - coffee, snack, & bitch session with lead programmer
       4:20 - drive home
       5:50 - arrive home
       8:10 - take calls from 4 other bosses debating strategy
       9:20 - end day knowing tomorrow will be exactly the same
       Total work done: 0
    

My typical day working for an enterprise:

    
    
       7:30 - drive to work
       7:50 - arrive at work, turn on Windows workstation
       7:51 - get coffee, greet co-workers
       8:10 - workstation finally up, check overnight logs
       8:15 - check email
       8:30 - resume programming on current project
       9:15 - take calls from 6 customers, changing scope
      10:00 - go to daily status meeting
      10:12 - everyone else arrives at daily status meeting
      10:48 - drop current project, work on daily emergency
      12:10 - go to lunch at mall foodcourt
       1:00 - check email
       1:10 - resume programming on current project, drop daily emergency
       1:40 - take 4 calls, give project status
       2:00 - go to Special Planning Session for Project #127
       2:12 - others arrive at Special Planning Session for Project #127
       2:48 - candy bar break, bitch with other programmers about code review
       3:10 - resume programming on current project
       4:00 - go to daily stand-up meeting for project status
       4:08 - others arrive at daily stand-up meeting for project status
       4:45 - email project status to 8 bosses
       5:10 - drive home
       5:45 - day ends
       Total work done: 2 hours
    
    

My typical day working for a start-up:

    
    
       6:00 - code
       8:00 - breakfast at desk while coding
      10:00 - coffee break outside
      10:10 - code
      12:00 - lunch at desk while coding
       2:00 - break outside
       2:15 - work on everything else except coding
       4:00 - review & print code
       5:00 - exercise
       6:00 - dinner with SO
       7:00 - visit mother, watch Jeopardy & Family Guy with her
       8:00 - code
      10:00 - turn off monitor, review code, plan next day
      Total work done: 8 hours

~~~
ido

        7:50 - arrive at work, turn on Windows workstation
        7:51 - get coffee, greet co-workers
        8:10 - workstation finally up, check overnight logs
    

You know you can just leave your windows computer on all night too, it will
eventually enter sleep mode anyway (takes a few seconds the next day to "wake
up") :)

~~~
dabent
That's against policy where I currently work. They also push updates that
require a reboot overnight. Lots of big companies I've worked for do that as
well.

------
Lewisham
I remember when I was at university in the UK (a Top 10 one, and Top 5 for
Computer Science). One of my graduating friends got hired by Accenture. When
he told on of the (well-respected) professors, the professor literally laughed
in his face.

I decided not to apply to Accenture.

------
patja
My two favorite quotes about Accenture are:

"Accenture is a great place to be from" <\-- not a great place to be at long
term, but your learn a lot, you get to see how the enterprise world works, you
make connections with other smart people who will help you for the rest of
your professional career, and it is great on a resume.

"At Accenture the great employees leave, the weak are fired, and the mediocre
become partners"

~~~
SMrF
Have to disagree with the second comment. My experience was that the partners
were exceptionally good at their job, which is essentially sales. Perhaps they
are mediocre along other measurements? Every single one of them was a
workaholic, which I don't find to be an admirable quality, so there's that.

Off topic from this comment thread, but the best part about working for
Accenture is the extremely transparent career ladder and laddering process,
(at least in the consulting workforce). It's something you only appreciate
once you don't have it. I was able to look out 10 years and see that I would
gradually be transformed into a workaholic sales guy that makes huge amounts
of money. As soon as I figured that out I was out of there.

------
americandesi333
This post really hits home for me. I have friends in consulting and I join a
small tech company in bay area instead. I cannot believe when I hear about
their experiences with consulting and how miserable they are in their jobs.

The struggle with consulting is that you never get to 'own' any decisions.
There is not much accountability between conception, design and
implementation. From my experience with big three consulting firms, they are
brought in by execs to either 'validate' a path that was already determined or
to get contract work done for short-term. In both cases, there is very little
impact you can have on the overall business.

In my experience, if you want to be a good entrepreneur, get a job where you
can own decisions and implementation. You will make mistakes, but you will
learn from them and can implement those learnings in your startup.

------
tekp2
Interesting discussion here. A few things spring to mind:

\- Consulting training still has an element of programming, but I suspect that
will go when Core Analyst School moves to Bangalore later this year. The value
is not that those guys will ever code, but to give them a feel for the types
of problems that the engineers face.

\- Solutions delivery (offshore or on) has pretty much taken development work
off the plate of a consulting analyst.

\- Consulting recruitment is swinging to favour engineering and technical
disciplines more than it has historically.

\- This group naturally favours high risk/high reward, deep technical
competance, and engineering as a craft. This is antithetical to firms like
Accenture that favour low risk (imply your own corrollary), relationships and
business knowledge, and engineering as an industry. This is also favoured by
our clients, which is why it's a very successful business.

\- I've seen some projects in pretty dire straits, and I've seen over-
committments. I've also seen some very effective cross-discipline teams
dealing very well with difficult client situations. I've met a lot of very
impressive people, and I've learnt a great deal from them.

\- It's a truism that Accenture wouldn't be there unless there was a difficult
business problem that the client felt that they couldn't solve on their own.
Sometimes they couldn't have, but more frequently, in my experience, they
could have done it themselves if it weren't for a paralysing fear of change.

\- Internally, the firm changes org structure most years. This results in a
very strong culture of personal network above business organisation. People
are astonishingly willing to help someone they've never met, even when they
are on the other side of the planet, and there's absolutely nothing in it for
themself.

\- I've never seen behaviour that I would regard as remotely unethical.

\- The comment about NHS is right - Accenture UK took a massive financial hit,
which resulted in a promotion freeze, and pay rises of less than inflation
that year.

\- My feeling at the moment is that Management Consulting will become much
more distinct from Technology, which in turn will become more like a "normal"
technology company.

Finally, it strikes me as a bit ironic that no one has yet highlighted the
similarities between a "classic" Accenture project team and a startup. Both
arrogantly believe that they can change things for the better by working very
hard, learning a lot as they go and blending a variety of hard and soft
skills. Sound familiar?

~~~
arethuza
It sounds like you work for Accenture, out of interest, have you ever worked
at a startup?

[Edit: I'm not asking to be snarky, just curious as I know a few people who
have worked for big consulting firms and who now work for early stage
companies and who relish the difference in environment. I was curious to see
if anyone has gone in the other direction.]

~~~
adam
I worked at Accenture for 10 years and am on my second yC-funded company after
leaving there. While I would never go back to that environment, I praise it
for what it is to this day. I strongly believe more than ever you just need to
understand yourself and "how you're built" and choose the environment that is
most appropriate for you. And that may change over time like it did for me.
But some people don't like the risks inherent in startups, or they need more
structure to their day and know they don't do good with minimal direction and
if that's the case, a place like Accenture is a pretty good place to work.

I wouldn't give back the skills I learned at Accenture and they've been
invaluable for working on Inkling, our first B2B business. From day 1 I knew
how to deal with large corporate cultures, understood the procurement process,
how to manage projects, create a budget, write proposals, deal with various
personalities, run a meeting and conduct workshops, conference call etiquette.
It may sound simplistic, but I can't tell you the number of deals I've seen
blown up simply because people don't really understand the business of
business. Those skills are a lot harder to pick up in a startup.

------
brendino
As a current Analyst (1 year out of college now) at Accenture, I have a few
points to add:

Positives:

\- Accenture greatly helps develop one's people skills and networking skills
which can help prepare you for a startup. Building these skills in college is
difficult, so jumping into a professional setting right after college helps.

\- The work enables you to understand real-world problems that clients are
facing, so you have a better base of ideas upon which you can launch a startup
(see <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2634665>)

\- In working with enterprise software, you gain an appreciation of how
complex (and how messed-up) some of this software can be. Enterprise software
is incredibly different from typical software created for the masses in some
cases. It is also rarely user-friendly. Compared to consumer software,
enterprise software has much less documentation and support available, so you
learn to figure things out with missing information.

Negatives (or "Deltas" in Accenture terminology):

\- The work is not always interesting and engaging. Since it's consulting, you
sometimes have to work on the boring, but necessary things, and to deal with
several levels of managers. Furthermore, working for someone else (vs. your
own startup) makes inspiration or dedication hard to summon at times.

\- Change is slow in enterprise software. Unlike a startup where you can think
of a new feature and implement it in a day, it can take months or years to go
from inception to roll-out for a new feature or innovation. There are so many
stakeholders that must be satisfied, and so much red tape to break. These
restricitions can stifle your personal creativity.

\- Working hours are inflexible and excessive. Management sets the expectation
that you must be in the office and working before the client arrives and long
after the client leaves. This leaves little room for work-life balance, which
gets very frustrating. On a positive note, however, everyone at Accenture in
the consulting workforce (in the US at least) gets five weeks of paid time off
per year (on an accrual basis).

Overall, Accenture is helping my professional growth and positioning me to
later start my own startup company. It's certainly a worthwhile experience and
a useful precursor to entreprenurialism.

~~~
Duff
Is it just me, or do all of the ex- or current Accenture people posting here
sound like Amway salesmen or cult members.

~~~
brendino
It's funny you say that - there's a lot of Kool-Aid drinking that goes on at
Accenture (or any other corporate consulting brand for that matter). Re-
reading my post, it does look a bit sales-ish.

Regardless, from my experience, there are quite a few people in the company
with cult-like loyalty. The majority, however, (myself included) maintain a
pretty healthy dose of skepticism and pragmatism.

~~~
Duff
I'm glad to hear that. Most of the Accenture people I've engaged with on a
personal level share that skepticism and pragmatism.

------
dartland
Great post! I came from consulting into start-up world also (although I'm non-
technical) and while you definitely have to re-learn many things to adjust to
building a company, there are many many valuable lessons from working in that
environment that entrepreneurs are all too quick to dismiss.

But the bottom line of your post is definitely the right summary: Do what
feels right when it feels right, and you'll be fine. You can't lose when
you're choosing between multiple interesting options. And as soon as your
current path becomes uninteresting, look elsewhere.

Thanks for posting.

------
bengl3rt
I've looked into consulting as a potential career, not with a behemoth like
Accenture, but with smaller more specialized boutique shops (Art & Logic) or
mid-size ones (Thoughtworks).

All I really want is a wide array of domain experience in different verticals,
and travel to lots of different places. However, everyone I've interacted with
has painted the services business as a cruel and hierarchical (and underpaid)
place.

That coupled with the fact that they seem to be so disorganized they never
even get back to you has left me pretty discouraged about the space.

~~~
jbrechtel
I'd be surprised if you heard about ThoughtWorks' professional services as
cruel, hierarchical and underpaid.

I imagine we're more the source of the 'so disorganized they never even get
back to you' part, right? If so, I apologize for that. If you really did just
get dropped by recruiting then shoot me an email and I can rouse the right
people.

~~~
bengl3rt
Emailed you. Thanks :)

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punchfire
ok so this is in Asia, i can't say how we operate in the bigger offices: i
feel that Accenture's one of the few companies that can provide you with
maximum exposure and experience in the shortest amount of time...there are ups
and downs but on the whole if you work well, you'll see great results...

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blueplastic
I work for Accenture R&D in San Jose, CA. Everything I've read here is very
different than my typical work day. We're hiring analysts (entry level) and
consultants (experienced hires) to work in our research lab. Both on the
Research (typically PhD) and Development (typically BA/MA) sides. Click on my
username and you'll find my email if you'd like to apply.

The people I work with are doing things like studying NoSQL databases
(Cassandra, Riak, HBASE), MapReduce (Hadoop, Cloud MapReduce), cryptography,
biometrics, language/sentiment analysis, data visualizations, cloud computing
(Amazon, Rackspace, VMWare) etc. We're not like the typical consulting arm of
Accenture. We're also not like a typical theory focused research lab.

We're a fun bunch. Recent company sponsored trips have included sailing the
bay, indoor skydiving at iFly, snowboarding in Tahoe, white water rafting,
wine tasting, hiking, a vegas trip and behind the scenes tour of the SF Giants
stadium. We're also known to throw some pretty wicked happy hours.

~~~
blueplastic
Oh, here's our group's website: accenture.com/techlabs

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astrofinch
As a college student, I've been thinking about working as a consultant so I
can survey a variety of different businesses in a variety of industries and
see how they operate. Seems like it might be a good preparation for being an
entrepreneur. (See this comment of mine for further justification:
<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2635564.>)

Does this sound like a good plan? What would the best consulting firm to work
for be? Ideally I'd like to see as wide a variety of businesses as possible,
and ideally they'd be well run businesses I could steal ideas from. But even,
say, seeing a bunch of poorly run businesses seems like it could be really
valuable.

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44Aman
"The height of absurdity was reached, I believe, when I was asked to prepare
the proposal for the preparation of a plan to produce a proof of concept for a
module of a tool the client was implementing."

Wow, that sounds pretty inane.

~~~
swombat
The best part was my manager, at the time, taking me aside and giving me a
little speech on how I should be honoured that the client was getting me
involved this early in the project - that typically only senior managers and
partners got involved so early in a project, and that as a consultant I should
realise that this was a great opportunity to help the client define what
needed to be done, etc.

In the meantime, I was busy working on not one but two startups on the side,
so although I nodded agreement (you have to be political..), I wasn't
particularly awed by the chance to work on this particular bit of work :-)

The rest of the project, once I got into managing the actual delivery of the
module, was much more sensible. And of course it didn't quite follow the plan.
Nothing ever does.

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jlees
I'm glad you wrote this, Daniel! I applied to Accenture three times, in my
final year of undergrad, a year after graduating and then again when I was
doing my Master's. I only got to the final stage of interviews once, and
apparently cocked it up simply because I didn't exhibit my listening skills
(despite, as I was coached, being the whiteboard monkey in the group
exercise).

I was devastated - I had felt challenged by the recruitment process and was
excited at the prospect of working there. Somehow now I feel a little better
about taking a different path in life. :)

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sfard
Seriously, since when is Accenture considered Prestigious? It's not even a top
consulting shop.

[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/McKinsey_%26_Company#Competitor...](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/McKinsey_%26_Company#Competitors)

~~~
notirk
Big 3 of consulting: McKinsey, BCG, Bain - These are all strategy only.

Accenture was the consulting arm of Arther Anderson which was one of the Big 5
of accounting (Enron brought them down.)

Accenture is known for implementation/technology/strategy. Along with
Deliotte, CapGemini, Booz, etc. These firms differentiate themselves with
implementation from the Big 3 that are strategy only.

~~~
lurker17
Accenture is more known for bungling giant contracts and sucking money out of
nearly-bankrupt organizations.

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rs3123
Interesting post. What was that bit about the three heads?

~~~
spatulon
He's suggesting that the only qualification Accenture required of prospective
new employees was having the correct number of heads.

~~~
hugh3
The fact that there's not already some law against this can only be attributed
to the weakness of the pushmepullyou rights lobby.

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gaius
_but which I saw I could now do with almost all subject areas._

Mmm, but you can't tho'. No-one can. What consultants do is fake expertise,
then actually learn it on the time the client is paying for an expert. Not
that that isn't a skill mind, but don't confuse it for something it's not.

~~~
swombat
I never mentioned anything about expertise. What I said was:

 _I also gained a lot of confidence in my abilities to pick up and absorb new
things and become productive quickly - something that I knew I could do with
technologies, but which I saw I could now do with almost all subject areas._

I think you're letting a prejudiced opinion of consultants get in the way of
the article.

~~~
gaius
I believe that you believe it, and can make others believe it, Accenture spent
a lot of money training you to, but c'mon, you can be productive in any
subject quickly? Really? Have you tried it in anything that was truly outside
of your comfort zone?

I'm an ex-Consultant myself, like you right out of college, so I know about
this from the inside.

~~~
swombat
Any topic that involves advanced maths or other hard science will be hard to
pick up quickly (despite doing a Physics degree), but other than those, most
business-related activities tend to be fairly straightforward to pick up, so
long as you have the right "learning materials" (be it work samples, manuals,
people to coach you, whatever makes sense for the activity).

Sure, there's a world of difference between "being productive" and "being an
expert", but again, I'm not saying you can become an expert in a week, I'm
saying you can be productive.

Moreover, I'd argue that with the right coaching/motivation/environment, most
smart people can do this.

~~~
arethuza
Out of interest, what business areas did you do projects in?

~~~
swombat
Financial services. In order of appearance in the movie:

\- Investment banking (primary/secondary market issue)

\- Risk Reporting

\- HR / Performance Management

\- Prime Brokerage / Hedge Funds

\- Middle Office Reconciliations

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peachananr
Inspiring!

