I lasted not even 6 months working in professional services, really woke me up to what "prestigious careers" really are.
It. Was. Insane.
Now I know someone that do that for the software for subparts of nuclear reactors and it’s exactly all the same. The specs, the time to review, the politics of hierarchy, the time to fix a simple bug (can take 2 weeks for a simple if)… But at least the specs are in a software.
Now 2 weeks for a simple change in a if. Some changes can take months and the software is not just a few line of code so if you do the math you may start to have rust on your hardware even before the v1.0 is out. Also nobody is going to read this type of “doc” but another schema spec coder if that’s the name.
"Let's sync this week for the pre-sprint Jira climbing"
(Hey, what are the worst bits of waterfall and agile? Let's combine them into our methodology!)
Plus, I could have used the compile, test, debug cycle to verify that what I was writing actually worked.
My specs were the same complexity as the code: Let's pretend, for example, there were no "sort" statement in the computer language. My spec couldn't just say, "sort the names in alphabetical order". My spec had to have the exact logic of a sort algorithm, but drawn as a flowchart (actually, not a flowchart but an AA proprietary format)
I didn't have to do "sort", but I did have to code algorithms that were more complex than that.
BTW, to make it more fun, there were rules about who was allowed to talk to whom. I was not allowed to talk to the programmer who had to retype my spec into actual code. I didn't even know who he/she was. And the programmer wasn't allowed to talk to me directly, but had to go up a chain.
And I don't think there was much that we as UAL employees could do. The fact that upper UAL management brought in AA to lead the project, to me, that means they were already dismissive of their in-house people and seduced by the outside people. Later in my career I experienced both sides of this a few times.
I only worked on the project 14 months. During that time the top AA partner in charge quit AA. Then the replacement quit AA, and maybe another. Maybe even they knew. I think a lot of people knew it was insane, but not able to change things as individuals.
https://dilbert.com/strip/2000-01-01?utm_source=dilbert.com/...
I had never touched Java before, we did C at college, and became a Java developer after 3 days holed up with 10 other people doing coding challenges on a laptop.
I didn't get to go to any of the training centers until I'd been there for a year.
Eventually they did switch to C. I wonder what the curriculum is today.
I don't know why anyone would hire these consulting firms other than plausible deniability of blame.
I would imagine that most large corporations and government code is still Java, only specialist systems are still COBOL.
I'm floored that you mentioned this. One memory I often cite of my early days there was walking past a colleague's desk and seeing a diagonal line of text from the upper-left corner of her monitor to the lower-right. Closer inspection revealed that she was processing a 30-character part number with as many nested IF statements, instead of iterating through it.
Even as a 21-year-old I was appalled that this was being delivered to clients.
I still have to use Java from time to time, and I dislike the amount of "Spring magic" that colleagues try to use with it. No wonder the kids end up writing junk, they are used to never understanding what's going on anyway.
I don't think we have such a strong tech scene here or that many household names, to work in SaaS companies, though I've also just seen that quite a few EU job vacancies are for companies for whom software development is a supporting activity (sometimes very important, other times less so) as opposed to their main and only way of earning money.
Maybe I've just been looking in the wrong places, but I don't think almost any of my direct acquaintances work for SaaS/IaaS/PaaS vendors either.
At this point in his career, 3 years after his PhD, he was unable to do anything except put on cufflinks and produce 120-slide Powerpoint presentations that went 30min overtime like he was working for the DoD.
It was an incredibly saddening sight. I talked to him about this and he was 100% convinced that he was doing his absolute top work by having pointless meeting after pointless meeting talking about nothing at all at great length.
The mindset of charging the maximum number of hours for minimal output is really hard to break out of. You can take the man out of McKinsey, but you can't take McKinsey out of the man.
https://mattstoller.substack.com/p/why-taxpayers-pay-mckinse...
And not for a cheap fee either!
https://mattstoller.substack.com/p/why-taxpayers-pay-mckinse...
http://www.newyorker.com/magazine/2002/07/22/the-talent-myth
A very wise investment (basically the Accenture partners needed to pay off the rest of the AA partnership to leave) in retrospect.
AA based on my impressions was the top of the big 6 accounting firms in size and reputation. Wow did they bite it hard in Enron. They probably all fled like rats to the rest of the former big 6, but all that hard earned reputation....
I was there for 5 years, and with the exception of one single project that lasted 1.5 months, all of my teams would leave the office no later than 6pm, and not once did I or anyone I ever worked with ever go back to the office later in the night. Once we gathered at the hotel bar after dinner with our laptops to practice a presentation we were giving the next day, but that's it.
It also wasn't difficult at all to develop a life outside of the company, even with the weekly travel. I spent a lot of time with coworkers, yes, but on most of my teams I genuinely enjoyed that time (and even long after leaving I am still close friends with many of them). We had hobbies together (would go to the gym together sometimes, explored different neighborhoods in town, played video games together, watched sports together, etc). If you're the type of person that thinks "work is only for work and therefor I can never be 'friends' with a coworker", then consulting isn't for you, but not everyone is like that.
The work-life balance and the general fun that I had were my favorite parts of consulting. I left because I found that every project I was on was inherently a "this company is full of incompetent morons and so they're hiring a bunch of mediocre consultants to come in and hold everyone's hand", and after several years it just got exhausting to always be the adult in the room.
When I was at a consulting firm in London that I wont name, I was charging them 700GBP a day, and they were charging the end client 1500GBP a day (I saw this on an internal presentation slide I was not supposed to see)
If you go as a independent contractor, you can bill close to that rate yourself, but may find that you can't bill quite that rate as the mandatory middle vendors will take their obligatory cut, you need health insurance and your own expenses and any moment you're not working whether between contracts or vacation is lost money. Still makes sense for some people, less for others. Depends on your expertise, preferences, sales and networking skills, and how good is your accountant. Always better to build reputation and then become small consulting company yourself, billing billable rates and paying salary rates to others.
(This is in the world of consulting. Math may be different in world of independent freelance technical developers)
Client hires company A, who bill 2.5kGBP.
Company A outsources to Company B at ~1.5kGBP.
Company B outsources to Company C for 700GBP.
Consultant at Company C makes buggery fuck all, and has to unravel the mess of Chinese whispers/obfuscation to work out what the job actually is and who they are meant to be pretending to be that day, whose report template was being used, etc.
It's just about what kind of clients you want to work with. If you pick any client that comes to your door and never say no then you'll end up in the race to the bottom with these large outsourcing corps.
Oh, and also, if you suck as a client, they're going to drop you and never answer your calls again.
The business never learn and if it wasn't for experienced DevOps managers intervening they'd still use sweatshop devs that barely speak English on their first gig.
Because "delivering a usable product" wasn't incentivized (specifically the 'usable' part, or what usability even meant), it was simply a race to generate specs, report on them with glowing optimism, and then stick as close to the letter of the specs as possible.
At least, that's the theory of why the insurance marketplace failed so spectacularly.
Once you get to an organization of a certain size- private or public- the people with purchasing power are never the ones who need to use the service. As such, purchases are never made with the end users in mind. Instead, there'll be a list of checkboxes of things that sound nice, and if you're lucky, that list wasn't specially crafted to exclude everyone other than some Manager's buddy's business.
That sounds like a certain "mega moon rocket" that's been under construction for some time.
1998 - walking around you saw dozens of copies of "ASP for Dummies" on various desks.
I started at $21/hr, then found out later some other folks hired after me came in even a bit less ($19?! - but hey, you get 'benefits' too!). They'd hired a 'real' HR person right after hiring me, and they clamped down a bit more. My interview was one of the last ones where there was no HR screening, and I was just talking to the top dev/eng folks directly.
1) EXCESSIVE Timekeeping (I had to log every hour basically I was at work, felt like an inmate). Sure that is there business I get it. But it's not for me.
2) Many projects(Same-Same): I also learn that for my personality (and sanity) i work better if I can focus on one or two long term projects. Doing 5 little projects different days of the week, was horrible. To rephrase, dealing with 5 different clients a week was horrible, 7/10 times you basically just undid half the work you did previous week. Since you know, "requirements change" or it took them two weeks to let me know "oh it has to work like this not that, I thought you will know this" type convos.
Anywhoo programming can be wonderful or it can be awful !
I tried another agency job 2 years later and it was exactly the same. Changed again a year later, and the same story. Had enough experience to quit and go freelance at that point.
I've spent my career at startups and growth companies building and scaling engineering orgs. So I take it as a given that I could get a highly capable team but wonder how much it would matter. Would we still be weighed down by internal bureaucracy to the point of failure?
I suspect that might be the case.
If so it's hard to fault a CTO for outsourcing. If your company isn't built to support having a tech org then you might see these kinds of failures no matter what you do.
It's possible. But it's really hard work, very politically expensive, and extremely high risk. So, yeah, not surprising.
> Branded as a success
I fear you aren't cyncical enough.
Was it a filure? Did the company's balance sheet improve? Did the company's stock price increase? Did the spinout attract a load of investment for its (pre-destined) success and turn that into a rich revenue stream?
Markets -- for both debt and equity -- are mostly idiotic machines on short timeframes. Your ability to generate free cash flow puts a floor on your price. Others' imagination and available liquidity are the only ceilings.
Additionally, these types of spin outs can behave like generational wealth. They may be incompetent idiots, but who cares? Daddy's money is more than you can raise and mommy's rolodex is richer than you could possibly imagine.
You have dozens of people with competing interests some of who are actively working against you and the C suite doesn't know what is really going on our what to do because all the information they are receiving is intentionally being distorted by people trying to spin it so they can keep creeping up the ladder.
The biggest enemy of a large organization is almost always itself.
I just want to point out that this isn't just legacy corps - I previously worked for a manager who went straight from a theory heavy CS degree to a theory heavy PhD to consultancy to management.
You still get companies like this where some middle manager with 0 years of SWE experience has to hire Software Engineers with 5+.
Software development requires placing millions of bytes exactly at right places to make billions of transitors sing and dance in precise sequence about billion times a second, every second. This is of complexity unlike anything humanity has ever encountered before.
1) decision makers take on less career risk (we hired Accenture and they defrauded us is probably better than we tried to do it ourself and we screwed it up)
2) Larger organizations can’t staff up and build a capability quickly and efficiently in non-core competencies.
When I read "Agile Model" I could already see it, Accenture signing a Time & Materials contract, giving no shit about the badly detailed scope on the clients side (after all this means more hours), and some bad PMing on both sides. I bet the responsive detail was not clearly stated on the scope, Accenture noticed it but let it pass since it is T&M...
I'm an ex-Accenture (and also ex-IBM iX, that fixed Hertz site in the end) and to be fair this is not a widespread behavior on those companies, it really depends on who is the Senior leadership for those clients and areas are. I've seen some good and caring ones on both companies but I've also seem some terrible used car salesmen whose dominance in the higher executive levels (since they bring money) made me decide to switch from both.
Come over, we have Thinkpads, whiteboards and friday beer.
On top of it they still want the software but they are not ready to pay the price for the software so they go for these con artist companies and in the end they have been milked 32M for a website that doesn't work.
Nothing against them as we all started somewhere. I respect the ambition but part of me feels a newly grad that has recently done a CKA, Az-400, Az-104 just isn't going to know the real world or compete with someone who has been around pre-cloud and witnessed the transition, or have enough hands on when things break very badly. They sure do know how to talk the talk however and make big company sound win some £££ contracts.
New devs/ops will never be able to appreciate pre cloud and how things are now, why they exist and what problems cloud has solved.
I guess when things get real messy they'll put one or two experienced staff onto the project still netting massive returns by billing by the hour in three figures.
#TRUESTORY
The amount of bureaucratic inefficiency in large businesses made me want to tear my hair out. Half the people I worked with knew absolutely nothing except how to protect their own jobs.
The consultant way.
Just had a consultant who literally got me to womp up a summary of everything going on (which was pre-existing analysis). They then added it to a PDF with some titles and a bit of fancy colour-shading, and BANG. £Xbillable hours and some expenses to boot. Honestly, the only "added value" they brought was to add on a cumulative growth percentage they obviously pulled out of their ...
Joke.
But I place the blame with the CEO, not the consultant. Consultants gonna "consult".
Can they find a loophole in a document somewhere or a mistake in some email that they can use to claim what they sold the client is out of scope, you mean.
Never again.
I'm not trying to claim moral superiority here or anything. Figuring out tricky ways to get the clueless rich to enthusiastically give up their money can probably be argued to be a moral good, provided the money isn't just going to some other even richer people. I'm just intellectually and emotionally unsuited to it.
Maybe I am just optimizing my employment the only way I know how, because I'm not suited to the more powerful ways.
The IT consulting firm will tell you they have experience with literally everything. They’ll dig up a case study from one of their 400 offices somewhere, claiming to be experts on whatever the topic is. Meanwhile, in actuality, your project will be staffed with a team of 24 year old kids where this is their first assignment. And it doesn’t matter anyways, because the people who worked on the original case study are long gone and would never communicate with other offices even if still around.
Meanwhile at the big company, you’ll have the opposite problem. A team of people with decades of experience, but who don’t really know anything about anything other than how to make their corporate machine not fire them. They’ll think they know what they want, and will confidently tell you…but in actuality, these people have zero understanding of technology or even how their business runs. And who can blame them, they’ve spent a 30 year career not doing or risking anything specifically, so its hard to learn how anything works with no feedback loop.
It then becomes a delicate dance, can the consulting team learn how to do the thing they sold the client fast enough, before the client does their best to try to ruin the project out of sheer hubris and incompetence.
This case is famous for being one where the dance went so bad it became a meme.