Accenture To Cut 19,000 Jobs (techcrunch.com) 43
Tech consultancy giant Accenture plans to cut 19,000 jobs, or 2.5% of its workforce, and has lowered its annual revenue and profit forecasts, becoming the latest behemoth to trim expenses in the wake of dwindling global economic conditions. From a report: The reduction in jobs, over half of which affects individuals in non-billable corporate functions, will be undertaken in the next 18 months, Accenture said in an SEC filing Thursday. The company had increased its workforce by 38,000 in the year that ended in February 2023 to serve the increased demand in its services and solutions, it said.
Build Back Better! (Score:1)
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Anyone that calls Accenture "better" has never dealt with Accenture.
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I don’t believe you (Score:2)
Yeah times sure are tough. Only 5% growth last quarter. https://newsroom.accenture.com... [accenture.com]
Re:I don’t believe you (Score:5, Interesting)
The reduction in jobs, over half of which affects individuals in non-billable corporate functions
They hired 38,000 people last year and are now getting rid of half of them. Any time a company has to eliminate 50% of the people they just hired a year ago, the very first thing that should happen is the CEO should be fired for being incompetent.
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Naw, it's just standard recruiting policy going back many years. I think it's safe enough to report a few of the funny details at this late date.
Someone I knew went to work for one of the big accounting firms after earning his MBA. Soon discovered that almost all of the people hired with him were going to be dropped within a few years. They just wanted to look at the best before keeping a few best of the best. (Then he went to work at Enron. In the internal audit section. Could have become a tough luck case
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I worked with H-1Bs from a big "world class" body shop. Their "DBA" didn't even know how to log onto PostgreSQL, and I had to teach him how to log onto the RDBMS server when setting stuff up. The only reason why they were there, was because they were cheaper. As for the quality of work? I wound up having to take over all DB admin stuff down to figuring out what tablespace got what type of SSD, while they just sat and watched Bollywood/Tollywood films on the company dime.
They were damn good at backstabbi
Re: I don’t believe you (Score:2)
Re:I don’t believe you (Score:4, Insightful)
They hired 38,000 people last year and are now getting rid of half of them. Any time a company has to eliminate 50% of the people they just hired a year ago, the very first thing that should happen is the CEO should be fired for being incompetent.
They aren't firing the same people they hired in the last year. They are just using the current business climate as a good excuse to fire a large number of people identified as poor performers. Likely very few of those 38k new hires are being laid off, since they probably haven't been there long enough for Accenture to make up their mind that they are poor performers yet.
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Maybe, maybe not. Accenture is a services business. They hire and fire based on local contracts. They will try and move people around but the reality is when times are good companies go to the likes of Accenture with wheelbarrows of money and say "do a thing for me" and Accenture hires people to do said thing. When times a bad the opposite happens.
Times are currently "bad". Companies everywhere are cancelling consultancy projects. It stands to reason that Accenture will not have people sitting around doing
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The reduction in jobs, over half of which affects individuals in non-billable corporate functions
They hired 38,000 people last year and are now getting rid of half of them. Any time a company has to eliminate 50% of the people they just hired a year ago, the very first thing that should happen is the CEO should be fired for being incompetent.
This is Accenture. "Incompetent" in a nice, expensive package is what they do.
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Any time a company has to eliminate 50% of the people they just hired a year ago, the very first thing that should happen is the CEO should be fired for being incompetent.
No not at all. Accenture is not a blue chip manufacturing business. Their staff numbers are not tied to production of something physical. They are a professional services consultancy, they ramp up and down along with demands from customers and quite often those demands are incredibly short term as massive projects come and go. Companies like Accenture are expected to hit the ground running and will often hire on the prospect of a contract before the contract itself is even signed so that staff can be traine
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According to the article, it does not look like they are even claiming that times are tough. They hired 38000 in FY23, expected 18% of their workforce to leave on their own. However only 12% actually left. This rif seems to be just a correction. Despite this RIF, their workforce has still grown by 19000.
Of course, the fact that not as many as expected left on their own may indicate that the job market is not that hot.
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What's perhaps most damning about all these tech layoffs is that they hired for the growth and size of sales they saw in 2021/2022. They have more than enough capital to survive what looks to be a relatively short lived downturn, coupled with the fact they know how hard it is to find the right talent when they need to grow, but are making redundancies anyway.
What they're effectively saying is that the CEOs responsible believe they're years away from being able to meaningfully grow their businesses to the le
Demand siders (Score:5, Interesting)
Demand-siders pushing for "inflation reduction via economic collapse" are causing this. What i mean by demand-siders are people who think that the best way to "fix" economic woes is by reducing the availability of goods and services. They think that if you reduce purchasing power and restrict capital for building new factories and construction, there will be less demand for goods and that will force manufacturers to reduce prices. Except, manufacturers aren't dumb .., they always have responded by firing people and reducing supply and therefore actually increasing the price of goods. Reduce demand by 1 unit, they reduce supply by 2. And a new competitor cannot come into their domain because competitors cannot raise the capital required to build a competing factory. So then, rather than admit wrong, demand-siders double down on their flawed theory and respond by making purchasing even tougher. In the end high unemployment, reduced supply of goods. Fewer people will have access to goods and services because most of them will be unemployed. In the end, there's always a recession. It is only resolved in the following election when the president loses and his successor rolls it back. Instead of trying to reduce demand for goods and services, maybe we should figure out how to increase supply and competition? Just saying. The inflaton of 2021 was caused by supply chain issues due to COVID, if we had just waited out the supply chain issues instead of panic-overcorrecting things would have moved back to normal.
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Re: Demand siders (Score:3)
Probably outsourcing. (Score:2)
Goose, gander.
Everyone else is doing it . . . (Score:2)
This is becoming comedically obvious that anyone who needed an excuse to tighten up and cut employee numbers or increase profits now can do it without anyone scrutinizing.
Get off my lawn.
Re:Everyone else is doing it . . . (Score:4, Insightful)
Honestly, is that bad? I mean, if a company did go through a period of unreasonable growth, or if the expected demand didn't materialize, adjusting should be normal practice. People get offended, but its not like they didn't get paid for their work, and there's usually some form of severance compensation. Plus, often they've been paid recently for very little work.
Sucks to be on the receiving end of this situation, but while it might be new to some IT folks (and certainly not all), this sort of ebb and flow has been part and parcel of most industries forever.
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It's bad they incompetently hired more people than they needed and failed to clean house as they went. Big layoffs cause morale problems and other disruptions, so any time they occur, they're proof that the leadership has failed. But the majority clings to the notion that business is meritocratic so they don't have to recognize how they're getting fucked.
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I don't really agree with you that it necessarily represents failure. If you foresee a large increase in demand coming and staff up for it, and it fails to materialize, well... "swing, and a miss". But if that work lands at your doorstep and you're not prepared for it, that's failure too. Nobody can predict the future of the technical industry with such certainty that they always have the best possible balance of staff.
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Honestly, is that bad? I mean, if a company did go through a period of unreasonable growth, or if the expected demand didn't materialize, adjusting should be normal practice. People get offended, but its not like they didn't get paid for their work, and there's usually some form of severance compensation. Plus, often they've been paid recently for very little work.
Sucks to be on the receiving end of this situation, but while it might be new to some IT folks (and certainly not all), this sort of ebb and flow has been part and parcel of most industries forever.
These all say X jobs. Rarely is a haircut across the board a good idea. Take Customer Service and Tech Support. Nobody has EVER spent too much money on that to the tune of 'warm bodies'. The metrics suck for those folks -- unless you have a super "big picture" auditor that's listening into calls that 'take too long' then you don't know if it's earning you good reputation, saving people from making mistakes or otherwise saving you money.
IT is a different animal altogether. It's the industry that uses H1
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This is becoming comedically obvious that anyone who needed an excuse to tighten up and cut employee numbers or increase profits now can do it without anyone scrutinizing.
Get off my lawn.
This should be patently obvious to normal people, but we have an abundance of folks that insist it's a massive conspiracy to hurt the economy, for the select purpose of hurting the current administration. You know who these posters are.
As if Amazon, Google, Apple, et al want to hurt the economy that funds their bottom lines. They're just pruning people (and thus costs) in a slowdown period. It's not rocket science. And it's not a conspiracy.
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This is becoming comedically obvious that anyone who needed an excuse to tighten up and cut employee numbers or increase profits now can do it without anyone scrutinizing.
Get off my lawn.
This should be patently obvious to normal people, but we have an abundance of folks that insist it's a massive conspiracy to hurt the economy, for the select purpose of hurting the current administration. You know who these posters are.
As if Amazon, Google, Apple, et al want to hurt the economy that funds their bottom lines. They're just pruning people (and thus costs) in a slowdown period. It's not rocket science. And it's not a conspiracy.
That may be part of the moaning, but the nonsense pretend relationship between the economy and the market is just jaw-dropping. Things like deficit, inflation, joblessness and things like basic financial/job stability of ALMOST everyone under most circumstances improving only happens over seasons and years, providing intelligent direction and responsible policies are put in place and not sabotaged over stupid stuff. (I'm not citing your example here; plans and policies that 'work' or even MAY work should b
Hold on (Score:1)
By my calcs those numbers mean they have more than 700 thousand employees.
That's more than enough people to run a decent sized cargo dock. If you have that many employees and at the end of the day you're not loading product onto trucks or driving it out the door, what do these people do?
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By my calcs those numbers mean they have more than 700 thousand employees. That's more than enough people to run a decent sized cargo dock.
What? That's more than enough people to run several hundred "decent sized cargo dock[s]". The Port of Seattle, for instance, is the fourth largest in North America... and it employs roughly 2000 people.
I can't imagine how Accenture could keep 700K people usefully busy.
TechBubble 2.0 has popped (Score:2)
Most of the overall economy is apparently humming along, but tech firms have been holding a fire sale lately. Thing is, tech jobs tend to be better than most, so people rightly give that sector an outsized amount of attention.
Accenture a.k.a. Anderson Insulting Can Fuck Off (Score:4, Interesting)
That company should be killed. It, Deloitte Consulting, Fujitsu Consulting, etc. etc. C Level Execs who are actually stupid and get their jobs from friends and networks hire these twats again through contacts, waste shit piles of everyone's money, and then fire them. And a year later they repeat the same bullshit. If you have a project, bite the bullet and get some personnel people in who know the subject matter, and just hire contractors straight up. If your company is big enough spin off a separate management arm owned by you. Then you can avoid Tek and all those other leeches as well. Hire qualified contractors (unlike what these managed services companies mostly hire), pay them what they are worth (hourly rates), and you will still almost certainly save money both in getting the job done right the first time, and likely not needing to hire as many people to do it. Those companies hire on people who are just there to help create "processes" to charge out for. And you also will likely not have them selling you shit software they front for but don't even know anything about. So one more time, fuck off Accenture. And no I've never worked for them, but had to endure them. And they were shit. And the large company that hired them to manage their entire IT systems and enterprise software systems, fired them when the contract was up.
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Indeed. Funny story, I probably will get to monitor a bunch of these underperformers in the next few weeks, because their customer is seeing them fail to do a not very hard project. Obviously I will not be the one tasked with fixing anything, I just get to report their current level of screw-up and delay to the customer.
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Experiencing this right now with one of these companies. Not picking up the pieces but hired in the middle to try and make it work (no chance, the product they are flogging is a piece of shit and unproven in the market, and is proving to be a piece of shit). I put my resume back up a week ago. This isn't worth it. lol
For once it doesn't register with me (Score:3)
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Ah, couldn't suppress your evil racist side? These are human beings being laid off.
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Accenture stopped hiring Americans ages ago.
Stop talking out of your arse, they did no such thing. Accenture still has a very significant portion of its massive workforce in America.
And in any case Accenture hires based on local customer demands. You didn't get hired when a major project came up for an Indian consultancy because you don't speak Punjabi? Boo fucking hoo to you.