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Comment by kitsune_ | Hacker News Reader

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.

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I'm sorry but this isn't an anecdote it's a rant. The only hard quantifiable information in your post is that you've worked at Accenture and that you visited a friend who was in the middle of his PHD. The rest is just emotions and yelling at people you don't like.

The fact that this is the top comment [1] on this story is quite frightening to me. It adds nothing to the conversation, and is an open invitation to an unsubstantiated but emotional argument about whether employees at large companies are all assholes that only care about money. Surely enough there's now a whole thread that doesn't add much to the conversation, and from which I've learned nothing.

This is a prime example of the decline of HN.

[1] Since we can't see points it's of course impossible for me to be certain whether this post has many upvotes, or whether it's at the top based on one of the other ranking parameters. (please let us have our points back!)

Example of the decline? What would have been more appropriate in your opinion?

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.

I'd blame the person and not the company myself if it were not for

a) Witnessing the havoc Accenture consulting unleashed upon a couple of businesses personally b) Knowing, albeit superficially, a load of people who currently work or had worked at Accenture. With the exception of one they're the poster jerks nobody likes.

Perhaps the culture is different in other countries. This was in Accenture UK.

Edit: I hate to suggest it, but perhaps there's also a bit of a perceptive bias going on, in both directions. I look for the good in people, and I found plenty of awesome people in Accenture. If you expect Accenture people to be arrogant idiots, probably every Accenture person you meet will look like just that.

Individual people I judge on their merits, same as anyone, but Accenture's involvement with the UK govt has been a disaster for everyone but them. What did they charge the NHS, and what did they deliver? Ripping off a healthcare provider is pretty low.

Accenture's involvement with the NHS was a major disaster for Accenture too. I can see why they went for it - it was the kind of huge contract that a company like Accenture can't resist - but unlike the other providers, they pulled out when they realised the whole thing was doomed (and took a very hefty financial penalty to do so).

FYI, they cancelled one of the twice-yearly promotion points because of the NHS debacle (which resulted, iirc, in a $450m write-off by Accenture UK, and basically wiped out the profits for the year). That pissed off a lot of people and caused a lot of their best people to leave the company. So, yeah, they took a big hit!

> Accenture's involvement with the NHS was a major disaster for Accenture too.

It still amazes me how many major disasters these large firms can absorb. A 450mil write-off would cripple most businesses. Not picking at Accenture specifically but I've seen Cap, IBM, etc all get doused by law suits and/or write-offs that are absolutely massive.

I would very much like to see a windfall tax on all those companies, to claw back what the last government wasted on them.

I actually read the contracts whilst in a non-programming role. There was about 6 inches of paper, all of it utterly terrifying and mostly contradictory. The NHS deal had so many things wrong with it.

When Accenture finally caved and gave up, the share price increased significantly.

When, 9 out of 10 experiences with a company turn out to be negative, it could be argued that you build up a negative bias. I'm not saying that there are no decent people at ACN, there definitely are.

Either way, Accenture has an awful reputation within the technology sector imo.

They are still in business and still profitable so they must be doing something right.

On the other hand it took GM decades to burn through their reputation until they had none to salvage. Now they apologize profusely for being a shitty car manufacturer. I still won't buy one btw.

Perhaps this is also internal vs. external insight. It seems like from swombat's and other commenters who have worked there, the consensus is that there are many talented people who work at Accenture (and other big consultancy firms). However as an outsider, when looking at some of the work by these types of firms, you generally don't gain a sense of confidence in the people working there.

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".

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.

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?

His peers probably think the same thing of him. It's rare to come across someone like that, but unfortunately they are sometimes around.

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