I’m not sure if OP is Indian but in Indian English this is a pretty standard way of using the conditional tense in that variety of English [1]. It has led to misunderstanding and miscommunication on my part, so I’m not surprised to see such confusion here
Edit: I see OP got this from the phrasing in the article "[Accenture] said on Thursday it would cut about 2.5% of its workforce..." . Not valid without the "they said."
At least in spanish media there’s a trend where lots of news are now titled in conditional to try to save face for the fact that the reporter has not done proper fact-checking so they can push the news quicker. And grammatically, it’s the better way, there’s an implied conditional. It also helps avoid clickbait ;)
The current headline of the linked article is Accenture cuts jobs, trims forecasts on worries of lower IT spending. I'm not sure if the headline had changed since OP posted it, but if so, there was no need to change it (I doubt Reuters would run with such a poor headline).
Sounds like a lot, but apparently they have 738k employees, up from 275k a decade ago, which seems just wild to me. (I don't have a clear idea of what they even do. IT consulting firm?)
> I don't have a clear idea of what they even do. IT consulting firm?
They do do some IT consulting, among other things, but the vast majority of their workforce is providing cheap sales & support staff to FAANG companies - these companies are famous for having well-remunerated staff, with generous benefits, hired through protracted interview processes. In reality most people actually working on their products are hired cheaply through vendors like Accenture and Cognizant.
You're using FAANG too liberally. Accenture is not focused on selling to tech companies, they have existed since forever (they were a branch of Andersen Consulting). Their market is "big companies", any big companies.
> You're using FAANG too liberally [...] Their market is "big companies", any big companies.
That's fair (though I can't edit now) - it's certainly not exclusively FAANG, though it is a significant percentage. Public contracts may be a similar or larger percentage.
There is some truth to it. However, you need to understand the business model behind this. Accenture is maybe one of the largest proxy employer. This way you can onboard and offload large numbers of teams - at least in theory.
I worked a lot with Accenture, enterprise context.
Content moderation is another one - farm it off to an external entity like Accenture to manage and you are at arms length from putting some poor content moderator in front of some pretty disturbing content.
> In reality most people actually working on their products are hired cheaply through vendors like Accenture and Cognizant.
Not for engineering work.
Vendors and Contractors typically have support roles like internal and external customer support or IT support. Processes that can't be automated will typically be sent to contractors until it's expensive enough that FTE automate it.
Same. Was at an F500 previously and we had a lot of Cognizant and Accenture personnel. COG was the line workers and ACC was engineers and higher-level stuff, like consulting for deployment roadmaps.
That’s surprising - their teams are rarely able to deliver anything useful. It’s easy to fool a bank or insurance company, but FAANG should be able to better spot their technical ineptitude.
I worked in boutique tech services for a long time and have overlapped with Accenture a few times. You are correct. Some of the smartest and most effective people work in consulting. The kind of people who can swoop in to a random company, size up their operations in a few weeks and spit out an actionable plan that really works. None of those kind of people work at Accenture. They employ the "1000 monkeys at a 1000 typewriters" approach to problem solving. Even before their big push offshore they used to land hundreds of liberal arts grads into a tech enterprise and ask them to just figure stuff out and bill as many hours as possible.
Not enough people, especially on this site realize this when they generalize about consultants being lazy, stupid, parasitic, etc. - the majority of the folks in SV could never cut it at an elite boutique consultancy. That said, consulting at an elite level doesn’t scale well, the equity multiples aren’t good and the lifestyle is a grind at best and mentally and physically unhealthy at worst.
Does it pay better than FAANG? I can't imagine anyone wanting to do that for less money than they would make working at the companies they consult for.
Likely a bit lower if you're looking like-for-like, but there are trade-offs that make it worthwhile.
Major consulting companies hire everywhere and have offices everywhere. Excepting the last couple of years, which are looking like an anomaly at this point, FAANG requires one to relocate to NYC/SF/Seattle. There are a lot of bright people who can't make that move, so consulting ends up being a good alternative. In non-HCOL markets, consulting pay is usually some of the best.
Unless you make partner, comp is going to be just base + bonus without equity. Even outside of HCOL, base can end up being higher than base at FAANG, which means when FAANG equity is down big like it is right now, the gap narrows.
Partner at a Big-4 or McKinsey/BCG/Bain will reliably pull $1m TC after a year or two. IMO making partner is easier than making FAANG director. PWC and EY both have 3-4,000 partners, for example. McKinsey has 2,700 partners and only 38,000 employees (a good chunk of which are back-office non-billable). Contrast that with the number of L8+ at FAANG which is usually 5-10x fewer, from what I can gather.
Ultimately if you imagine a 28 year old consultant making $170k in Kansas City working remotely with a FAANG team of 24 year olds making $200k in Mountain View, it's quite possible that the consultant is banking more than the FAANG team, and with a different potential trajectory comp-wise.
Consulting is in a weird spot right now. It used to pay well and give good projects that allowed to get experience and nice exit opportunities (aka skip few years of usual career grind).
Now lots of projects are uninteresting. There are still elite and specialized consultants who do complicated stuff but they are a minority.
Often the teams now are just 'staff augmentation' - headcount outside of headcount.
For programmers consulting never really made much sense anyway. Why sit at BIG4 company making slides when you can sit in FAANG coding?
Consulting was always for finance guys. But now top finance guys go to investment banking, machine learning or (as funny as it sounds) crypto.
There are still good projects with good exit opportunities in finance, but it is night and day when compared to 80s or 90s - when consultants were the true elite.. just because they could see how things are made in different companies. Now the companies blog how they do stuff.
This is the type of uninformed comment I mentioned earlier. The draw of specialized boutique consultancies is the ability to step into challenging situations, take charge, make a big impact and move on to the next engagement once the problem is solved.
You get lots of at bats to do “something big” as opposed to 9-5 keep the lights on work that most engineers do for years in stagnant, highly politicized cultures year after year waiting for their boss to quit to get a promotion. It’s also a good way to level up a stagnant career.
The downsides include always “living in someone else’s house”, having to adapt to the clients tech and culture, having to leave your work behind and start from scratch.
Agreed that these type of shops are in the minority and once they scale, they exit to the big guys who then kill the culture and drive away the talent.
Palantir (from the outside) seems like a good example of this dynamic scaling along with the advantages of maintaining their own stack. Could you imagine what it would be like to be an engineer employed by the customers they serve?
>Some of the smartest and most effective people work in consulting. The kind of people who can swoop in to a random company, size up their operations in a few weeks and spit out an actionable plan that really works.
This is a seriously underrated comment. While having sometimes dismal reputations, IT MSPs and (SWE, DevOps) staffing firms often having legitimate rockstars. Some of the best, most efficient engineers I have worked with were employed by these types of companies. This involves delivering solutions on time to the customer while retaining soft skills, often while being the enemy of the incumbent engineers.
Yep this has been my experience as well. Especially with Accenture. That said, someone quoted above, they have 700k+ employees. Im sure there is a ton of bad apples to go around. I have spent 20 years + in Financial Services and was always impressed with some of the teams involved in the M&A side of Accenture. They were very talented and dedicated to the cause.
typically, those 1000 monkeys are led by a few really excellent technical people. and don't forget the account managers who know exactly how to manipulate the client...
Having worked there in the past this can be the view from the outside.
My anecdotal evidence is that those small starter teams do deliver alot of value, of which the client likes and wants more of. However the client does not have the resources to do this themselves (Likely the reason ACN are there to start).
Then from here it's self-fulfilling, more people leads to more projects leads more resources.
The consulting playbook for these companies is bring in a rockstar team at or below cost for an initial project. Blow the client's mind with velocity and quality, then scope out of a bunch of follow on work using the highest margin, cheapest offshore resources they can find.
And usually, the client has money for TVCs but not enough internal resources due to dysfunctional management hierarchies.
Those same hierarchies will then inevitably fail to make proper use of the contractors, just as they failed to make use of their employees, leading to seemingly "useless" TVCs "bloating" the org. Symptom rather than cause of the client's failings.
My wife worked for them in Dublin and a huge amount of them were content moderators looking at horrifying things people had posted on Facebook. It sounded like a terrible job that destroys people's minds. She wasn't in that department but _detests_ Accenture regardless.
Yes, I worked for a slightly dubious precursor to things like onlyfans (much cleaner, their tagline was "keep it flirty, not dirty"). The content moderation team was mostly women and the things they dealt with were generally pretty horific.
Part of the value prop of Accenture is that they employee inexpensive foreign labor. They have 300,000 employees in India alone[0]. If those people are working at $20,000 a year, that's 300,000 * 65,000 = $19.5 billion in yearly profit from those employees alone. And India is a relatively expensive country these days; their margins in Vietnam and Thailand are probably even greater.
The average new grad in a consulting company like TCS/Wipro/Infosys has started at around 3.6-4.8k usd/year for like the past decade. I think Accenture would also be in similar range but not sure.
Private sector White collar salaries in VN, Thailand, and India are roughly comparable.
That said, there isn't as deep a bench of expendable somewhat English fluent software talent in VN or TH (largely due to the explosion in technical colleges teaching basic fizzbuzz in India and the lack of English medium education in VN+TH).
Both VN and TH are also clearly targeting South Korean and Japanese companies instead of American ones ime due to the 2013-17 Trade War between PRC and Japan+SK.
Vietnam maybe, but Thailand is a middle income country. India has an HDI of .63, Thailand is at .68 (China is at .76, the USA is at .92).
Labor costs are only one part that detract from your margin, you also have to consider productivity (what are you getting for your costs) and overhead (what taxes/bribes/rents do you need to pay). It is really easy to set up in a developing country and lose money rather than make it.
Right, and part of the "value" that Accenture brings is that it knows how to operate in these areas. It will send US-based managers to work with the foreign dev teams to, ahem, ensure productivity on projects where it matters (on many projects e.g. government contracts the output doesn't really matter), it knows the local bribes and customs companies need to follow to operate in the area.
Those Thailand numbers are way off. Thailand's HDI is 0.8 and expat salaries (at least at McK) in BKK were always Shanghai and Beijing adjacent (if not higher until the 2010s).
Heck, a lot of Vietnamese prefer studying and working abroad in Thailand because salaries and development is higher than in VN and only the elite can afford to send their kids to VinUni or RMIT Saigon.
Bangkok is an anomaly, these numbers are Thailand wide. I was surprised China passed Thailand in the last decade (given those numbers are country wide as well, Shanghai is going to be much higher than .76). Last time I looked 10 years ago, China was lower than Thailand, things change quickly.
The original premise that Thailand is cheaper than India is definitely wrong, we both can probably agree on that.
I think the issue was Google Search's summarization algorithm parsed the wrong sentence in a non-verified website (I did the same search you did and recreated your issue).
Also, the same thing holds for China as well. BKK =/= Thailand and Shanghai/Beijing/Tianjin =/= China as well. Not to mitigate the massive amount of development that China has seen the past 20 years, but Thailand's subregional development (measured via HDI) is very even - the poorest region (Isan) has a HDI of around 0.781 and the richest (BKK the prefecture, not the city) is around 0.839 in 2021. Compared to China outside of Tier 1 cities it's a significant difference (and on a separate note Ik Chinese policymakers have been looking into Thailand's anti-poverty policies to replicate them in Shaanxi)
Not sure why you included Tianjin there, it isn't as rich as Hangzhou, Guangzhou, Shenzhen etc...
Thailand back slided during the last decade because of political instability. Having a military coup every couple of years isn't great for business. Although I agree that .68 is too low for Thailand from personal experience. It feels like Thailand should still be above China, but I'm not confident in making that call without seeing the numbers crunched (so I'm willing to accept your numbers more than the ones I found via a quick Google search).
I included Tianjin because it has significant autonomy and ability to gain funds thanks to being a Provincial Level city. Not having to deal with the overhead of provincial politics helps! Imo Guangzhou and Shenzhen are anomalies due to how closely integrated Guangdong has been to HK (and thus able to get much more FDI and build a stronger economy than Nanjing for example).
Generally speaking, the median Thai person does tend to have a better life than the median Chinese person, simply because poverty eradication has been a pretty significant plank of both the Junta and the elected politicans, plus the massive amount of FDI coming in from SK+Japan after the whole 2013-2017 trade war.
But then again, comparing a Billion+ country that gives significant administrative autonomy to provinces with a unitary country with a population comparable of Zhejiang might be unfair. At least on a developmental and economic level, Thailand would be comparable to Jiangsu or Zhejiang.
So does Chongqing but it wouldn’t be considered a rich city. Tianjin is the place I go to see derelict sky scrapers, they had one on my first visit in 1999, they have the tallest one now.
About 10 years ago I worked with someone in Australia who was from India. He worked for Accenture in India as a programmer and earned around 180USD per month. So their profit for outsourced work can be a lot.
> (I don't have a clear idea of what they even do. IT consulting firm?)
you dont even want to know, just be sure that if they get invited in to join a project, leave! At least from my experience on their IT side, was it Andersen before a rebrand? Drop in 3 developers, then sell a 'manager' to oversee them, then recommend a few more devs, and add another layer of management, and so on. I saw 3 projects suffer this type of infection, and they all suffered for it.
You're thinking management consulting, like Bain or McKinsey. Accenture is a body shop. They put butts in seats for IT service contracts, typically for the lowest price point for clients.
That's what they started out as (actually, as a spinoff of Arthur Andersen, so both management consulting and IT consulting). Nowadays, most of their business is outsourcing. Companies will outsource the maintenance/support of entire applications to them (like take over a company's billing system and be responsible for keeping it running and making ongoing enhancements) or an entire business process (like Accounts Payable). Typically they "rebadge" the client's employees as Accenture employees, charge the client X% less than what the client is paying to do it themselves, and then reduce headcount, offshore some work, automate some functions, etc. in order to run a profit.
Source: I work for a large consulting firm that competes with them.
My impression was that they take a lot of government money and technically keep a lot of government employees classified as private ones. My brother-in-law leads a software team that works on state benefits systems I believe.
They take the government money alright; laughed out loud reading: "Accenture engaged in an IT overhaul project for the British National Health Service (NHS) in 2003, making headlines when it withdrew from the contract in 2006 over disputes related to delays and cost overruns" [1]. But then I cried (thinking about my tax rate) when reading: "In 2012, it was revealed Accenture was paying only 3.5% in tax in the Republic of Ireland as opposed to the average rate of 24% it would pay if instead based in the UK." As any real company Accenture was headquartered in Bermuda in the 2000s and nowadays it's in Ireland. What can you expect from a company split from the Arthur Andersen.
They do every sort of consulting, including but not only development of custom software.
For example, just from the largest Italian bank they make hundreds of millions of euro of revenues yearly.
It doesn't materially affect your point, but '1 [percentage point] lower revenue growth' means slightly-less-than-1% lower (as in lowered by slightly less than 1%) total revenue.
1% lowered revenue growth (which I know isn't what you meant) would mean slightly-less-than-0.01% lower total revenue.
I wonder if any of this is as a result of any of their big tech clients scaling back their TVC usage. Google, for example, has about 180,000 FTEs and another 180,000 TVCs. One might reasonably assume that, if an enterprise were to go on an efficiency drive, lots of process rationalization & simplification would occur, obviating he need for so many vendor supplied staff.
That said, Accenture is like most of the big consulting & outsourcing firms in having a stack ranking review process that encourages low performers to leave.
Does anyone know why the big companies didn't scale back their TVC (Temporary, Vendor or Contractor) usage before laying off full-time staff that take an order of magnitude more resources to hire and fire?
I was under the impression that flexibility was one of the big reasons for TVC use, much easier to scale up or down, akin to cloud computing resources.
I suppose the lack of TVC scale-down at companies like Google is yet another indication that layoffs aren't a financial necessity or even a best practice; it's just the hot market signal to show investors that you're serious about "battening down the hatches" for "economic downturn."
Probably because a TVC that doesn't pull its weight will be let go right away. I suspect that the "economic downturn" is just an excuse to trim the fat. Also note the wording in OP: these are "non-billable corporate functions". ie middle management and such.
> Does anyone know why the big companies didn't scale back their TVC (Temporary, Vendor or Contractor) usage before laying off full-time staff that take an order of magnitude more resources to hire and fire?
> I was under the impression that flexibility was one of the big reasons for TVC use, much easier to scale up or down, akin to cloud computing resources.
I think many companies use them for flexibility, but my impression is that social media companies (of which Google is one) have other reasons, such as protecting their FTEs from the soul-killing aspects of content moderation.
I suspect they are, but typically TVC is on an annual or project based contract so they might choose not to renew once the terms are up. Also ending a contract agreement won’t make headlines so we probably just aren’t hearing about it as much.
As a faang employee who works with lots of contractors: we did. We've cut millions of dollars of vendors and contractors. Everywhere. It's just not making headlines.
> Does anyone know why the big companies didn't scale back their TVC (Temporary, Vendor or Contractor) usage before laying off full-time staff that take an order of magnitude more resources to hire and fire?
They do all the time with simply not renewing contracts. TVC are also generally assigned to support a product or group of devs so they typically come and go with the product.
What? There's no way to classify vendor or contractor spend as capex.
The reason they are used is for tasks that are repetitive, or with no career progression, or that may not be needed long term. Your comment about cost is correct as well.
Not exactly, I was in ads, but Dublin has a lot of contractors (right across the business) so I talked to a bunch of them/a bunch of people hiring them over the years.
My favorite Accenture story is when they charged Hertz $32 million for a website that never went live. Wonder if they will perform better with a smaller headcount.
Unless you count the UK as a banana republic (well maybe these days...a turnip monarchy perhaps?) they did manage to fleece the NHS quite successfully:
I worked with some Accenture people on a gov.uk project not a lot of years ago -- they were hand installing redhat 6 machines that we'd have to request via spreadsheet....
I wonder how this ended ? But I think it is still in the courts. Not that I am a big fan of Hertz, but I hope the win in order to send a message.
Things like this are way too common these days and not only with software, I have seen it myself may times. If I were a CEO (I far from it), I would make sure that the contract states exactly what is needed plus cost recovery if delayed more than 6 months.
Consultancies like Accenture have a vast army of contract lawyers who'll be on the look out for clauses like that, ensuring that they don't end up out of pocket because a project overran or didn't meet expectations.
That initially sounds incredibly shady, however it's not infrequent for projects to fail for reasons outside the contractor's control. Maybe the client can't make up their mind as to what they want, or internal politics mean funding gets cut for the project and it's terminated halfway through. Big contractors absolutely will sign a contract with clauses around deliverables and timelines, but they'll also refer every little deviation from what's listed in that contract to a change control committee to ensure it's accounted for, and doesn't come back to bite them in the ass.
Mostly you don't want to run a project like that, because as you work through the implementation you find variations from what was originally documented, or new edge cases that need dealing with. In many cases you're better off taking the risk of overspend or overrun than ending up with some software that perfectly fulfils a set of requirements that don't reflect reality.
It would be interesting to understand how things went so wrong from Accenture's perspective. I've no doubt Accenture (and every large consulting firm) does have some of top technologists in many different domains, but that's not necessarily who is working on your project. Typically you'd try to balance those high end resources with cheaper offshore talent, and that offshore talent is a dice roll. It's up to Accenture to manage the offshore team and provide enough oversight to detect and correct problems before they make it to the client. This sounds like they were working directly with an offshore team without the onshore resources providing the appropriate oversight. That or they got a dud for the onshore oversight who didn't or couldn't appropriately manage the offshore deliverables.
I worked on this project as a Lead FE Developer. Management was a shit show and they were dreaming with scope. Our first "epic set" was supposed to be delivered sprint 1, wasn't completed until like 5 months later. We brought it up immediately and were shut down at every step of leadership. Eventually complained enough that I personally got rotated off, but it's to this day the worst project I've ever been on.
To echo thoughtpalette (we were 2/4 onshore FE leads) - There was a lot of miscommunication between Accenture and Hertz in terms of requirements and sizing up the existing architecture. There were a lot of bad assumptions made, inadequate experience with the chosen FE stack and inexperienced offshore developers. Was an absolute clusterfuck.
Consulting companies like that come in two flavors. Both types start with 'you want something we will build it'. When it comes time to do it though you get two wildly different types. One is you will specify every little detail. Think number of pixels from upper left of the screen a control will go. Oh you want it to move with the window and reflow correctly? Oh that's a material change of contract (i.e. more money for them and crap for you). The others seem to have a clue and will just build the right thing in the first place (rare). They both snag you on the back end with support. It is like a box of chocolates you never know what you are going to get.
Having used this particular one in the past. You want to have your details in order before you build anything (waterfall). But at that point you might as well make it yourself in house. But you are already committed to it (sunk cost).
It is great for middle managers who want to still 'code', but not really, but want to be architects. They get a 'cheap' team and maybe look like they are still doing things. I personally got the leftovers of that on a few projects when the manager realized it was basically a double time job to manage his own team and the offshore one too. The manager will get bored with it or overwhelmed by it and realize 'oh wait I need 3 of my devs and 2 PMs to manage this bad boy'.
If you think you have the 'they will build the right thing' kind of guys you need to test for that. Even then a 'good shop' can turn into something else later on as they switch people in and out on you.
Your first method sounds like what is necessary if you're working primarily with offshore consulting. It's primarily staff augmentation, and you've got to own and specify every last detail like you said. This is often where I see consulting engagements go astray. Companies take on staff aug resources without the necessarily skills to get good work out of them.
> Even then a 'good shop' can turn into something else later on as they switch people in and out on you.
YES! Those super talented consultants are in high demand for new deals. They often lead the charge on the proposal, initial project work and early conversations with the client, but may rotate off to focus on landing a new opportunity.
If you’re dealing with consultants then put in the contract that the team that sold you the deal will be the team that delivers it or you walk. It’s not rocket surgery.
What's not clear based on the article alone is the employee location of these cuts. Accenture is very big on using non-US labor for just about everything they possible can for (my assumption) lower cost of labor. If these cuts are coming to higher-cost-of-labor countries then it would be wise to look closer if they can to shift these jobs to India/similar (which is again is playing into their human capital model).
> "Accenture ... would cut ... 19,000 jobs" is in the first paragraph
OK, but the actual title is... in the title itself. I think the bigger question is, why did OP feel the need to make this edit? HN guidelines state "...please use the original title, unless it is misleading or linkbait; don't editorialize." [1]
> you know exactly what they mean
I didn't, at least not when I first read the headline. As mentioned in other comments, the use of "would" implies a condition, i.e. "Accenture would cut 19k jobs if ____ (some condition were met)." In grammar, it's called the 2nd conditional. [2] That's how "would" is normally used in this context. And if we assume that OP followed the HN guidelines, we'll assume that's what the article is about.
As it turns out, that's not what the article actually says. In this case, I had to click into the article to find that out. By itself, that's only a few wasted seconds. Not a huge deal, but it's not exactly a good thing either. More broadly, if we don't call this kind of thing out when it happens, it will tend to happen more often, and that will affect the user experience of this site.
Maintaining a minimum standard of grammar in headlines is one of the ways we keep this site usable. If English isn't OP's first language, maybe they should be more careful with English-language edits. I don't think that's asking too much.
it can be argued the title of the article on reuters is misleading or inaccurate, because the cuts are not complete
op meant to say "will", which would have made for a less ambiguous title. but confusing that with "would" is a common mistake, and it's especially forgivable since "would" was used in the introductory paragraph in a way that appears non-conditional
i don't think a simple translation error warrants a bunch of slippery-sloping about The Rules and telling them "if your English isn't perfect, maybe work on that before posting here"
> "if your English isn't perfect, maybe work on that before posting here"
That isn't what I said, is it? I welcome their posts. But if English isn't their first language, maybe they should trust the English-language abilities of the journalist who wrote the headline, rather than thinking they know better or trying to editorialize.
> it can be argued the title of the article on reuters is misleading or inaccurate, because the cuts are not complete
That's not necessarily true. News headlines have a number of grammatical idiosyncracies, of which the use of present-tense to refer to past (or future) actions is one. [1] They're kind of a grammatical minefield, which is all the more reason to trust the original headline author instead of editorializing.
While I agree that there's not a good reason for OP to have changed the title, both OP and the journalist are Indian, and saying the OP should 'trust the English-language abilities of the journalist who wrote the headline' is a bit ignorant.
> saying the OP should 'trust the English-language abilities of the journalist who wrote the headline' is a bit ignorant.
Serious question- how is this ignorant? I genuinely don't see how that follows from what I said, since nothing in my comment implies that Indians have inherently inferior English-language communication skills, or that Indian-English is somehow inferior to the vernacular I use. It simply states that one individual (i.e. OP) should have trusted the abilities of another individual (Chavi Mehta, the journalist).
> both OP and the journalist are Indian
I really don't see how the journalist's ethnicity is relevant, and I'd love some clarification on why you do. Regardless of where they're from, they were hired by Reuters, a news outlet which publishes content in English. I'd be willing to bet that they were vetted for this job at least in part on their ability to write in the vernacular used by Reuters. OP had no reason to doubt the effectiveness of that process, and should therefore have "trusted the English-language abilities of the journalist...", as I said.
OP themself was a bit ignorant (of the HN guidelines, not in the sense that you mean) when they edited the headline.
It's also a bit arrogant for them to assume they're better at crafting headlines than the entire team responsible for publishing the story (the journalist, their editor, the Reuters proofreaders, etc.).
All that said, I've already invested way more effort into this conversation than is warranted by OP's (relatively minor) faux pas. I decline to continue participating.
> nothing in my comment implies that Indians have inherently inferior English-language communication skills
I’m not sure how implying English is not their first language does not call English language communication skills into question. Incidentally, you are likely correct, as very few Indians speak English as a first language.
> I really don't see how the journalist's ethnicity is relevant, and I'd love some clarification on why you do.
Ethnicity is not relevant, cultural context is. Likely neither OP nor the journalist speak English as a first language.
> It's also a bit arrogant for them to assume they're better at crafting headlines than the entire team responsible for publishing the story
Reuters is a news agency. Their headlines are supposed to be uneditorialised almost by definition. It’s not about being “better at crafting headlines”, it’s about adding an editorial slant to a neutral headline. I agree that it was the wrong thing to do, but news outlets the world over will “craft” different headlines for this story based on the same wire story.
It could be perfectly correct (if rather quaint) meaning Accenture (personified) would like or wishes to cut jobs. As in Accenture would that these people were no longer employed, or would rather fire than keep them.
That's kind of a stretch though, wouldn't you agree? I would be hard-pressed to name a major news source that typically constructs their headlines this way.
In any case, it still doesn't explain the intent behind editing the original title. I would argue that "this headline needs more quaintness" is not a valid reason to editorialize here.
The original article has a perfectly sensible title. Why mangle the original title into something so confusing? What has OP not speaking English as the first language got to do with deliberately mangling the title? From the site's guidelines:
> Otherwise please use the original title, unless it is misleading or linkbait; don't editorialize.
I don't think not knowing enough English is a good reason to ignore the site guidelines.
Friendly reminder to assume good faith [1]. We can't know whether GP knew exactly what OP's title meant or not. Personally, I thought it meant that Accenture would cut the jobs if they could, but something was stopping them.
I haven't checked OP's profile, and we don't need to to talk about this. I want OP to feel welcome here, and that isn't incompatible with talking about clarity and keeping original article titles.
> More than half of the 19,000 jobs to be cut will be in its non-billable corporate functions, Accenture said, sending its shares up more than 4% before the bell.
I'm not yet accustomed to the fact that some people see the equivalent of a city being laid off as a favorable signal.
It's a favorable signal if you think that they have too many employees for their current requirements - or if you think that they have enough inertia to produce good results in the next quarter due to a drastic cut in expenses, and you plan to exit before the long-term effects catch up to them. It could also mean that you still think that their ship is sinking, but it's just sinking a little slower now.
No one thinks it's an ethically good thing to do, or that the human lives affected by it are irrelevant. The direction of their stock is almost completely divorced from those kinds of questions, and is instead a purely financial judgement.
It's good to be somewhat confused by that state of affairs, otherwise you'll mistake wealth or popularity for goodness or rightness. We need to be careful to structure the our society and the means to change our culture such that we don't systemically bias it towards unfavorable outcomes that might be more successful in a more ruthless environment.
As I understand it's not a favorable signal but a correction. The market price, in theory, already reflected the expected demand downturn so measures taken to lower their "non-billable corporate functions" costs usually means that the market will correct the price.
That said, I'm not a fan of corporate behemoths using humans as an elastic resource or ballast they can throw away at the first sign of problems. This isn't a mom and pop that can't keep paying an employee during hard times but a public company keeping their year-to-year indicators looking pretty.
They are outsourcing aggressively and high ranking people have metrics about work that has been offshored.
Theu are providing services mostly "by the hour" or per project whose internal metrics are also compared with charged hours.
Because of their metrics being directly correlated with headcount they need to hire. Probably they will be hiding their offshoring behind the general lay off environment and is not comparable with the reasons for the tech sectors layoffs.
In the grand scheme of things it is not a large number for the size of the company but it would be a good number for a moderate offshore hiring spree.
When companies have layoffs, one thing they do not discuss in the numbers that they publish, is the fact that they cut contractors as well. Now you're seeing the other side of that.
According to an article in the Financial Times (gated), more than half the cuts would be coming in corporate functions (i.e. back office) and not client-facing roles (i.e. sales, delivery, dev, etc.).
https://www.ft.com/content/346357fd-4fb5-4794-9706-807eaf767...
Laying off people who are billing clients would be ridiculous because that’s where the money comes from. I suspect the bench (consultants in the firm looking for billable work) is very deep and costly right now so if there are any cuts to the people who actually make money it will be the bench.
For people like me who are not very familiar with some of these corporate terms, can someone explain exactly what "back office" means? Is it IT?
I understand sales, delivery, etc. Dev is software development teams? So I presume back office excludes software development teams? Any concrete examples of teams that belong to back office?
“Back office “ in this case means employees who are not billing clients and therefore do not bring any money to the firm. In consulting you have to be billable at a rate a certain percentage above your cost based on your level in the firm. High level people have to bill a lot more than they cost to maintain their target margin. If you’re not billing then you only cost money. There’s no other revenue source in consulting than billing time to a client.
I think back office is just a generic term for non customer facing positions, usually supporting internal operations in a corporate environment, not a specific department or function. So a software developer could be back office depending on context.
You know, using absolute numbers to talk about layoffs is unhelpful, and extrapolating trends from them makes for bad, possibly harmful analysis. I get that big numbers draw eyeballs, but still.
The next best alternative is to express it in terms of a % of total employees. Better yet would be to compare the # of employees over time (possibly expressed as a proportion of some business metric such as revenue). Is this just a reversion to the mean? And is such reversion because they over-hired or because their revenue growth has meaningfully slowed?
But real useful insight would also require comparing this to other companies, including smaller ones. Just as bad as, or possibly worse than, Accenture cutting 19,000 jobs—some single digit percentage of its employees—would be to have thousands of companies cut, say, 20% of their staff.
There's a lot of availability bias in just plotting absolute layoff numbers from Big Tech and other large cap businesses.
They went on a buying spree over the past 3 years. I wonder if they are using this financial environment to get rid of people that came with these purchases.
This is a company that bills it's sales team to clients indirectly. Wonder if they've automated/ ai-fied some of their mundane corporate functions and back office activities leading to this point.
I highly doubt they've replaced internal functions with AI. They're probably just firing a bunch of people, and telling anyone left that they'll have to pick up the slack and to be thankful for still having a job.
More than half of the layoffs will affect staff at its non-billable corporate functions, the company said, sending its shares up more than 4% before the bell.
People who aren't consultants that bill clients. Based on my experience, there aren't a lot of useless middle managers in consulting as they prefer people with client billable skills. Of the folks I work with, the sales staff aren't billable (but they bring in the sales and are likely safe in scenarios like this) and neither is HR and some of the administration roles. I'm a regional practice manager for a large consulting firm responsible for technical excellence for our consultants as well as setting the strategy for our cloud and applications development practices. I'm still a billable resource who is expected to deliver value directly to individual clients when I'm not doing that or working on new pursuits. The vast majority of people I interact with on a daily basis are all billable. It's not until you hit regional and national VP roles that the demand for billing drops off.
Accenture is a body shop so anyone who isn’t working for a client will constitute as non-billable Corp function. HR, marketing, sales, middle management, recruiters, IT admins, and so on.
There are a huge number of "devs" that only graduated from bootcamps, don't have a passion for development, and are in it only for perceived low effort high salarial benefits. These people are going to exit the industry and go back to their former occupations as the bar to hiring increases even a little.
Who said there's no end in sight? Are you saying layoffs will continue indefinitely until there are zero software developers in the world?
>how many more laid off devs can the industry really support?
How many millions of developers are there (according to the 2020 Developer Survey by Stack Overflow, there were over 60 million developers worldwide)? What fraction of this is 170k, and how many will be rehired just as part of normal hiring?
