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.
My information is 4 years old now, so perhaps someone else can pitch in something more up to date, but back then:
- They switched to Java
- Solutions Workforce, being engineers, were expected to already know how to program, and only got a day or two of induction (which was lame)
- Consulting got a 2-week induction (Core Analyst School) + 2 weeks of programming classes, iirc
- Back in the Andersen Consulting days, consultants did do some (generally considered dreadful) programming, but by 2003 they launched the "Solutions Workforce", which was designed to be made up of people who actually knew how to program for longer than 2 weeks
I don't know if they've since dropped the programming classes.
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...
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.
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".
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.
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.
Exactly, those clients should simply learn to do some background checks on these companies verifying their projects log(un/successful). But as said somewhere else, if the project is "golf course software" common sense doesn't apply.
When I started with accenture 10 years ago, I was the only coder in my startup group and part of the induction was basically to see how well I could help out my team and get them to finish their work.
