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.
