Three years less a month ago you hired me without so much as an interview. I had to insist to have one.
Since then:
I’ve done every silly thing that has been asked of me on time and without a single voiced complaint.
I’ve sat through endless mind numbing meetings where consensus rather than leadership and good ideas ruled the day.
I’ve endured your monthly complaints about how expensive my rates were. (Despite the fact that you hired me for my expertise and the fact that I could do correctly in a day what it would day twelve of you to do incorrectly in a week.)
I’ve bitten my tongue at meetings while you bastardised my ideas and paraphrazed them until they sunk into your thick skulls and them came tumbling out of your mouths as if they were your own.
I’ve suffered your public servant mentality about bullet proof job security.
I’ve listened to how consultants are a necessary evil and that you could have been one but chose instead to stay in public service (As if your complete and utter lack of skills and tallent was not a contributing factor!)
And now, on a whim, because the maintenance of 30 different subcontractors has simply become too much of a chore for your two brain cells, you are about to throw every one (including me) out and replace us with that slick lot of overpaid children called Accenture (formerly Anderson Consulting). Never mind that six of their analysts don’t have the collected experience in IT that I alone have. What’s important is that they make very pretty project plans and hold regularly scheduled team building meetings. It’s like a corporate Scientology meeting.
Finally, you won’t even recommend me as a subcontractor to these droids knowing full well that there isn’t a single one of them that knows your system a fraction as well as I do. And you think you are going to get your money’s worth from those buch of kindergardeners? Wait till you get a load of their rates… Oh, wait. You don’t care, do you! What’s important is that your VP and their VP go to college ball games together. Of course. How could I have been so blind! I can see how having Accenture actually wright your request for bid for this contract, send it to themselves, and then win it (shock!) does not constitute a conflict of interest. Yet, me asking you to recommend my services is a definate no-no. Yup, that would be a great travesty of justice. Ya bunch of sniveling, no-tallent, workshy, dead end job beaurocratic whores!!! May you all collectively drop dead of festering genital lesions!!! Fucking ingrates…
You could set random power on passwords on all of their servers, reboot them before you leave and then forget the passwords.
[sub]Disclaimer: This post is for joke purposes only and is not intended to encourage any possibly illegal behaviour on the part of the OP, regular posters and readers of the SDMB, or employees and hangers on of the Chicago Reader.[/sub]
There, there Silver, they didn’t hire you for your spelling skills!
This is not news in our industry friend, but I’m sorry to hear it happened to you. A certain very large corporation on the west coast has recently installed a group of absolutely know-nothings to handle their contracting needs, but at least the new group had the smarts to sub-contract most of the old ones to maintain continuity, for a while.
These kinds of decisions defy all logic, and probably all involve some sort of ball games.
Good luck to you on your next gig. (Or are you already set?)
If they are going with Accenture, they are doomed, anyway. Best to move on and find an employer that prefers integrity. (I’m not sure why in the world you would want to sub for Accenture: if you thought the current group of mouthbreathers had a tendency to steal ideas, wait until the pros get there.)
Well, I’m not proud of it, but, the money is very good, the work is easy, it beats having to search for another job (and perhaps move as well). It would be the path of least resistance and I’m working towards a lifestyle change in the next few years.
Not set yet. Been kind of dragging my feet for the past month but I’m in full search mode now. The economy, such as it is, is making it a little tricky. I’m still doing the full court press on the client and the Accenture managers. I think I can make them see reason but I’m not entirely sure it will be worth the effort.
Quicksilver, what consultancy are you working for now (if I may ask)?
I have some fundamental problems with Accenture, starting with the whole name change thing. A company with international name recognition changes its name because of poor internal organization (confusion with their Legal consulting unit, etc.), and then runs a series of TV ads about the name change which give no clue as to what the business actually does. Yeah, these are people I want business advice from…
And in my experience, it’s usually the consultants who steal the ideas from the company and repackage them as their own (well, our PW consultants always did…).
I’m an independant consultant. I deal with a few agents who generally need to be lead by the nose to the actual opportunity in order to find work for me, but they serve a purpose in giving me an arm’s length detachement from the client and all the legal crap that comes with signing a contract.
The way it was explained to me by one of the Accenture partners is that when they were Andersen Consulting, large sums of money were being paid to Arthur Andersen (the parent company) as equalization payments for the use of their name. The IT division (Andersen Consulting) was much more profitable in the past 10 or so years than the parent accounting company. The partners of Andersen Consulting decided that they would rather keep the money for themselves and sued the parent company for their independence. As a price for their independence they had to give some obscene sum of money to the parent company (near 1 billion I’m told) and could not use the Andersen name. They spent a couple of million on searching for a new name and came up with Accenture.
In my 12 years as an independent consultant the trend has been remarkably predictable. I’m subcontracted by one of the big consulting firms to do the work for them (mostly cuz they haven’t a clue) or by the actual client to fix the mess left behind by one of the large consulting firms. In short, I have a special warm place in my heart for these clowns because they keep me living in a style I’ve grown accustomed to.
Actually, that makes more sense than what I was told. That’s what I get for asking a KPMG partner.
Money well spent. They still made a pig’s ear of advertising the changeover.
Yeah, consultancies seem to be going through the trend that computer companies went through not all that long ago: the industry giants become hidebound and small independents spring up to either steal their work or do “freelance” project work for them. It’s a good time to be an independent consultant, from what I’ve seen (albeit still a lot of work).
