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Ask HNers : what's your view on big consulting firms ? (accenture etc)

by al_ on 3/22/10, 5:14 PM with 3 comments

I'm currently finishing my Computer Science degree. Lately there was a carreer fair at my university, apparently lots of consulting firms ( accenture / deloitte / etc ) seem to be interested in hiring Comp Sci grads. I talked with them but I'd like to get some feedback from HNers. Personally it seems that I love writing -good- code too much to work for them, but then again it's just my general feeling, I might be completely wrong. Any insight would be appreciated.

  • by plinkplonk on 3/22/10, 5:53 PM

    If you must work for a consulting firm, go work for ThoughtWorks (I am an ex employee) . Developers get respect, decent projects(as far as consulting/enterprise sw) is decent) , great colleagues, roles are fluid, 8small* (but awesome) company etc. Like all companies TW has its dark side, but it is mostly methodology/language fan boism, not much backstabbing politics.

    If you like writing "deep" code, avoid consulting and get into something that interests you (for me it was MAchine Learning and AI) or work for or build a startup.

    Good Luck.

  • by lhuang on 3/22/10, 8:44 PM

    I work for one of these consulting companies. If you wan't to write code, steer far away.

    Most likely, they'll staff you in some project management role where you're working with the client to manage a team of developers and/or a workstream consisting of individual projects.

    If you have experience with scaling applications and IT architecture, you'll be staffed on IT Assessment and Architecture design projects - very likely with a large insurance company looking to consolidate all their various legacy systems.

    Also Empire29 is right, to a degree, that these firms aren't thought-leaders. Clients are very risk-adverse and are wary of too new technologies. Plus most of the time their choices are limited to the technologies they've already invested into and/or skillsets among their staff.

    Working for one of those firms will however, give you experience and exposure to the business side of things. Some HNers trivialize these areas, but I've found just seeing how a big organization is run - good and the bad - has been pretty useful. Regardless of how talented you are as a hacker, very likely somewhere in your career - be it with Google or at startup - you'll have to engage and interact with the suits and experience with a consulting firm would give you a good background to do so with ease.

  • by empire29 on 3/22/10, 6:18 PM

    Big consulting firms = long hours, lots of travel, lots of exposure to "enterprise" software. A lot of actual code development is being outsourced, though there are clients that require the consulting dev team to me onsite. Also, these bigger firms tend to be slow moving and very risk averse, so be aware you may not be using any cool new tools and technologies (though this all depends on the clients/project/management team etc.) I would not consider these large firms to be thought leaders in the industry as it takes so long for them to vet new technologies and methodologies (at least in my experience).