The people consulting firms “deliver” to have no idea it’s broken and don’t really care because they’ve never seen the software or process and they never will.

Plus, Deloitte said it’s fixed now and Deloitte knows best or else they wouldn’t have charged so much, right?

Half the reason these consulting firms get hired is to be a scapegoat by the director/exec when things go south. Liability is one reason they can charge a premium.

The companies seem to be claiming that their products work fine in other places and blaming their customers for the places where they fail.

> The consulting company defended its performance at the time, saying it was continuing to improve the system and it would run more smoothly as employees from the Department of Economic Opportunity (DEO) learned to use it properly.

> “As we have communicated to DEO, we believe that any remaining issues deemed ‘high impact’ by DEO’s own definition either require Departmental actions or are otherwise beyond Deloitte’s control,” they said.

> Price also said the company had worked on systems in states including Minnesota and New Mexico, which he said have weathered problems relatively well.

People who hire these companies are typically not competent enough to recognize a broken product.

Spot on, that’s it exactly. Worked with Deloitte aka Doolittle for several years and they delivered consistent crap results, but the people who kept signing the contracts weren’t even SMEs in the area of their responsibility.

Reputation is managed by networking: going drinking with the right people is often more important than delivering quality products.

Or, in the case of government contracting, providing a revolving door for people who leave government to be given lucrative private sector jobs.

G4S were selected to run a new private prison at the same time as being fined £44m for previous fraud. But then, private prisons in the UK aren't a "market" - how could they be? There's only one buyer and in practice only one seller.

Because quality isn't what matters, and they can paper over it with ads, personal relationships, presentations, sponsorships.

I had a pretty good experience with Sapient once.

I suggest it probably depends a lot on the location though I would never touch Accenture or Deloitte and would only allow Bain or McKinsey to deliver on something for which they had very material experience, and never let them do actual work because they will f it up.

Not OP but (s)he never mentioned anything about shipping broken products ...

If OP is me, I think it was implied when I referenced quality. If it was the author of the article, I believe that was part of the title of the article.

In a badly managed mess of a project, "reputation" means never implicating the wrong person in the inevitable miss-steps.

And by "wrong person", I mean "your boss, your customer, or anyone who they are friends with".

At least now their reputation has gone up in smoke amongst the hacker news readership.