I left Accenture (Italy) this january, after 3 years, and just like you I was hired right after graduation thanks to my 'mad' java skills, after about 1 year I wasn't writing much code anymore and SQL, Word & Excel became my only daily companions.
Negatives/things I didn't like during my experience in Accenture:
- Working 10-14 hours a day (^). If you were to leave at 6pm your supervisor
would joke about it ("hey, did you get that part-time thing?").
It's alienating and can be done only if you're young & single.
You are supposed to immolate yourself for the company.
- Procedures & timetables to fill: I were required to follow the
most cumbersome procedures even for the simplier tasks and file every
single small detail of what I've done in a form somewhere for monitoring
purposes.
While this is a good practice in general, what was going on there
was beyond absurdity. I spent more time reporting what I was doing
than working on the actual task.
- Dressing code = compulsory business attire, Suite + tie (!)
- Managers overlydramatic speeches. Laughable attitude.
- Strong pyramidal scheme. If your non-technical supervisor closed a deal
with the client on a specific feature, it didn't matter if it was technically
unfeasible and risked to put in jeopardy the whole system, you were -ordered-
to do it. obey. Reworking was then very common.
- What matter isn't the quality of your work, it's the amount of time
you spend on it. You're consultants and your company charges the client by
the hours you do. The more you stay in the office, the better is for the company.
Optimization? who cares.
- Most of my coworkers there were really, really, really bored.
Their life was sucked into the office, and the only thought they had on a
typical monday morning was how to make it through the next weekend.
Positives:
- I found some truly talented people, and I learned lots of both technical
and people skills.
- You get to learn some self-discipline, especially when it comes to schedule
your time to reach specific goals.
- On a professional point of view, I grew up a lot, it's a good 'gym',
an eye-opener.
Anyway, in all honesty, I'm glad I've been working there and I do not regret it at all. If I were to run a startup right after university, I would have bit off more than I could chew, probably.
(^) I don't mind working 10-14 on my own stuff, things that I'm crafting with my hands and that I find exciting. Pretending to work 14 hours on a bi-monthly report just because you've got to leave at the same time as everybody else is another thing.
"What matter isn't the quality of your work, it's the amount of time you spend on it."
So what is the motivation for employing good developers then? If you make more money by taking longer then the sensible thing to do would be to hire less skilled people who talked a good game but were poor at actually doing stuff.
The problem here is that considering how these consulting companies are structured, how they work and their size, the capability to hire good developers imho is not even there.
Also, are companies like Accenture chosen by their clients for the incredible quality of their work? I'm also from Italy, so i could have observed something peculiar to this market, but the clients of those big consulting corps (usually from the financial sector or similar) just pick one of the biggest players as a "safe" bet, technical considerations are not part of the decision.
Which big player do they choose and why? I remember a discussion here on HN about "golf course software", that could be the methodology.
Client pay for predictably mediocre. It's a scale: pay $X and get Y% probability of the project being done by D date. Of course they don't even get that; in practice, Accenture are as unpredictable as any large-scale software development effort. So rather than mediocre yet safe, you get mediocre, and late, and over budget. LOLZ on you! Or on your poor shareholders/taxpayers more like.
When I dealt with Accenture (back when they were Anderson Consulting), they were quite predictable - always late, always over budget, and always producing an unmaintainable mess.
The developers were good or bad in about the same percentages as other companies, but the management structure was designed to suck money out of the client. Work product was secondary (or, whatever) and it showed.
That's actually what they do, but a consistent number of consultants on a specific project is necessary to justify their high prices. And they can do it because once they've taken control of most of the client's backoffice, so that he can't stay in business without them, they can ask higher fees.
I think I got lucky as far as working hours went. I was in an account and with a client that didn't seem to care so much. Even at that client, some Accenture teams worked long hours, but the teams where I spent a lot of time were never the 12-hours-a-day workaholic types. I'd say that for 98+% of my time at Accenture, I arrived at work around 9am and left work around 6pm, with a decent lunch break in the middle (30-60 minutes).
Had similar experiences (i guess this is the norm) in my first years as a consultant and yes, while is often frustrating working in a big corporation (consulting or not) is really an eye-opener and can leave a positive mark on how you approach your profession (as in becoming completely intolerant toward: bad use of time, useless bureaucracy, inconsistent planning or design/architectures, etc... ).
I'm the same - worked myself to death while there, but don't regret it now. I truly learnt some amazing skills and life lessons. Now I earn more than I ever did there (10 years!), have far less responsibility, have far less time pressure to work under... and am bored stupid most of the time :(
Just for anyone wondering, not all consultancies operate this way. I've been at ThoughtWorks for 2 years now and it's nothing like this. It's quite literally the opposite on every negative point mentioned above.
Negatives/things I didn't like during my experience in Accenture:
Positives: Anyway, in all honesty, I'm glad I've been working there and I do not regret it at all. If I were to run a startup right after university, I would have bit off more than I could chew, probably.(^) I don't mind working 10-14 on my own stuff, things that I'm crafting with my hands and that I find exciting. Pretending to work 14 hours on a bi-monthly report just because you've got to leave at the same time as everybody else is another thing.