Comment by tluyben2 | Hacker News Reader

Comment by tluyben2 | Hacker News Reader

I have had similar experiences multiple times and you definitely learn not to really care and let it be as this is what it is.

It took a bunch of teams of senior devs and other people 1 year to translate some simple excel sheet with formulas into a little Java powered site on top of a database. The cost was a few $100k and the end result was something most people here on HN can do in an afternoon (max a few days), but tech was never the issue; it was the process & politics between the IT dep (which was in another country (Germany), the head office, the hired consultants (I was one of them) etc. My job was to steer the tech people at a high level (they had their own project manager etc; that was not my job) and the consultants (from another company) that did the implementation kept disagreeing with my approach and everyone else kept disagreeing with everything else (like the color of a button). In the end it was implemented like I wanted it in the first place (and they took the credit) and I heard, much later, from one of the seniors that their PM told them to disagree with me to pump up the final bill. Which worked; luckily I never worked 'with' them again after.

> their PM told them to disagree with me to pump up the final bill

This explains a lot of my experiences now

IMHO that would a rare to almost non-existant thing. Any sort of Mega Corp has an unending stream of IT work. There's no real need or desire to pump up the final bill. You'll make way more money in the long run coming in on time and under budget.

These are often long term projects; consultancy firms, especially big ones, are very good at delivering over time and over budget and still remaining there 10+ years. They are trained to do this and do it well. Maybe it depends on the region but it's very normal in Europe anyway for the Cap Gemini's etc to do this.

Sure they have an unending stream of work, but you rather still do far less work for far more money or rather; be able to bill far more hours for the same end result is preferable for profits. The art is then to still have a ravingly enthusiastic client at the end of the project. It's an art. Or a scam. As a techie I find it the latter but I admire how they keep the client happy, time and time again.

Things go over time & budget for lots of reasons. The biggest one is that the lowest bid is likely to win so the incentive is to under-estimate. But it's rarely because the contractor is intentionally creating more work.

although the problem is there's no incentive to perform when delivering late and over budget rarely has any consequences

although the problem is there's no incentive to perform when delivering late and over budget rarely has any consequences (on future work streams)

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