As a current Analyst (1 year out of college now) at Accenture, I have a few points to add:
Positives:
- Accenture greatly helps develop one's people skills and networking skills which can help prepare you for a startup. Building these skills in college is difficult, so jumping into a professional setting right after college helps.
- The work enables you to understand real-world problems that clients are facing, so you have a better base of ideas upon which you can launch a startup (see http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2634665)
- In working with enterprise software, you gain an appreciation of how complex (and how messed-up) some of this software can be. Enterprise software is incredibly different from typical software created for the masses in some cases. It is also rarely user-friendly. Compared to consumer software, enterprise software has much less documentation and support available, so you learn to figure things out with missing information.
Negatives (or "Deltas" in Accenture terminology):
- The work is not always interesting and engaging. Since it's consulting, you sometimes have to work on the boring, but necessary things, and to deal with several levels of managers. Furthermore, working for someone else (vs. your own startup) makes inspiration or dedication hard to summon at times.
- Change is slow in enterprise software. Unlike a startup where you can think of a new feature and implement it in a day, it can take months or years to go from inception to roll-out for a new feature or innovation. There are so many stakeholders that must be satisfied, and so much red tape to break. These restricitions can stifle your personal creativity.
- Working hours are inflexible and excessive. Management sets the expectation that you must be in the office and working before the client arrives and long after the client leaves. This leaves little room for work-life balance, which gets very frustrating. On a positive note, however, everyone at Accenture in the consulting workforce (in the US at least) gets five weeks of paid time off per year (on an accrual basis).
Overall, Accenture is helping my professional growth and positioning me to later start my own startup company. It's certainly a worthwhile experience and a useful precursor to entreprenurialism.
It's funny you say that - there's a lot of Kool-Aid drinking that goes on at Accenture (or any other corporate consulting brand for that matter). Re-reading my post, it does look a bit sales-ish.
Regardless, from my experience, there are quite a few people in the company with cult-like loyalty. The majority, however, (myself included) maintain a pretty healthy dose of skepticism and pragmatism.
Being part of a large organization, the organization gives you the answer. It may or may not totally work for you, but you working for a profit-making MACHINE. Successful companies learn to indoctrinate(willing) their employees. A good employee at any company should be able to rattle of why they are there and what the companies believes in. The only difference for a corporation is that there are a lot of people using the same answer :)
If you are employee, work with Accenture consultants, and want to see them pull their hair out then work long hours. They'll try to maintain the work longer deal until they give up.
Other than that, they team that I worked with was great. It helped by having a great Associate Partner managing the project, but most of the team was very knowledgeable. I was able to watch several projects from a distance, and I know this wasn't the norm.
- Change is slow in enterprise software. Unlike a startup where you can think of a new feature and implement it in a day, it can take months or years to go from inception to roll-out for a new feature or innovation. There are so many stakeholders that must be satisfied, and so much red tape to break. These restricitions can stifle your personal creativity.
There was a good article linked on HC that was full of quotes from founders who were acquired. The difference between a startup experimenting with a new feature and a corporation is that if you F up it only affects a small number of people. For a corporation, an error could be millions of people affects and tens or hundreds of millions of dollars lost.
Positives:
- Accenture greatly helps develop one's people skills and networking skills which can help prepare you for a startup. Building these skills in college is difficult, so jumping into a professional setting right after college helps.
- The work enables you to understand real-world problems that clients are facing, so you have a better base of ideas upon which you can launch a startup (see http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2634665)
- In working with enterprise software, you gain an appreciation of how complex (and how messed-up) some of this software can be. Enterprise software is incredibly different from typical software created for the masses in some cases. It is also rarely user-friendly. Compared to consumer software, enterprise software has much less documentation and support available, so you learn to figure things out with missing information.
Negatives (or "Deltas" in Accenture terminology):
- The work is not always interesting and engaging. Since it's consulting, you sometimes have to work on the boring, but necessary things, and to deal with several levels of managers. Furthermore, working for someone else (vs. your own startup) makes inspiration or dedication hard to summon at times.
- Change is slow in enterprise software. Unlike a startup where you can think of a new feature and implement it in a day, it can take months or years to go from inception to roll-out for a new feature or innovation. There are so many stakeholders that must be satisfied, and so much red tape to break. These restricitions can stifle your personal creativity.
- Working hours are inflexible and excessive. Management sets the expectation that you must be in the office and working before the client arrives and long after the client leaves. This leaves little room for work-life balance, which gets very frustrating. On a positive note, however, everyone at Accenture in the consulting workforce (in the US at least) gets five weeks of paid time off per year (on an accrual basis).
Overall, Accenture is helping my professional growth and positioning me to later start my own startup company. It's certainly a worthwhile experience and a useful precursor to entreprenurialism.