accenture

pwd

http://www.rte.ie/business/2007/0309/accenture.html

100 new jobs in dublin
How good are they to work for? (particularly with relevance to the technology solutions departments). Do people generally advance quickly in places like this?

melekalikimaka

my mate just got on the graduate program, with marketing, seems to be a good company from that end anyway

bullpost

Not sure what it's like now. but it had a reputation for being a conservative, pressurised environment. Having said that, if the IT experience is good then you can't go far wrong .

kmick

Worked for them - great company but they work you very hard.
You need to have done a Masters and got a first/2:1 to get in (but in any discipline).

Starting salary around 28k but you will do about 20 hours overtime a week.
Promotion evry 2-3 years but you have to be top of your game all the time.

Lots of programming for the first 2-3 years then you get into management after that.

Great perks, great money, great people - very hard to get through the Interview process. If you PM me i'll give you some tips.

If you are afraid of hard work stay away from this company.

Stark

They're supposed to be better to work for these days, the hours aren't meant to be as bad. You do get paid for overtime which is very rare for an IT company so that's a plus.

pwd

What about people entering as "experienced", rather than on the graduate programs?
How much overtime do they seem to expect? Personally, being paid for it is less appealling than having a life . I get time in lieu where I am now for any extra hours I do.

kmick

They do pay overtime and the hours are still as bad. I finished up there recently. I was one of those experienced IT people. You enter a stream called 'Services'. It is not as well paid as the 'Consulting' stream but it has its advantages. They do pay reasonably well I will say that and there are lots of perks like a 700 euro technology allowance which you can spend on Laptops, Desktops, PDA's etc. Plus there are bonuses and OT at around 20/hour.

pwd

20/hour for overtime isn't good in my opinion. How many hours do they have you work a week?
They have an ad on their website for consultancy jobs within the experienced section. However after sketching out a profile only the technology solutions job came up as fitted my criteria). I tweaked my profile then out of curiosity to see what they wanted for consultants, but no matter what I said this still was still the only job that matched my criteria. Odd I thought.

markpb

kmick wrote:

Plus there are bonuses and OT at around 20/hour.

That doesn't seem great to me either. Either accenture staff are badly paid or OT is only paid at the normal rate?

Raskolnikov

kmick wrote:

You need to have done a Masters and got a first/2:1 to get in (but in any discipline).

That's not true at all.

pwd

Thanks for your replies

Sleepy

From about the age of 16 I wanted to be a consultant with Anderson's as they were at the time and went for the interview during the Milk Round in our college. I made it to the final stages of the interview process but had a partner who'd been thrown into the interviewing role at the last minute and wasn't very happy about it as my first interview of the 3 you do at that stage. I missed the interview (only job in my life I've not been offered) and at the time was pretty upset about it.

Skip forward two years and I ended up at an Accenture staff night out with a friend of a friend and I've never understood the phrase 'thanking god for unanswered prayers' so well. I've scarcely in my life been in a room so full of egos. Add that to their reputation as being like working in a pressure cooker 60 hours a week and I couldn't be happier to have ended up in something more relaxed where I've progressed just as quickly even if I'm not on quite the same income level.

Work to live, don't do it the other way around unless you want a nervous breakdown in your mid thirties.

Oracle

I know nothing about Accenture but I was thinking exactly the same as Sleepy, and his story eloquently expresses my sentiments. Think about what you're doing with your life. This is a multinational corporation, whose profits run into the millions. Guess who's generating all that income for them? You are. Why sacrifice your life and your mental and physical health for their benefit? Yes, you'll probably get a good salary, but it's a pittance in comparison to what they're going to make from all your work.

If working for this type of company suits you that's fine. Perhaps taking a job with them is part of your long-term career plan that will eventually see you working for yourself in your own business or developing your own consultancy, that's brilliant. I think it's important to think strategically about why you're taking the job and how it fits into your long-term career plans. That way you stay in charge of your life, rather putting your life in the hands of a huge multinational corporation that doesn't care about you, or anyone else.

paddyc

get out of the rat race man dont spend your life at that carry on shirt and tie and beating the traffic to get if for 9... not worth it... move to asia and be an ebay power seller


paddy

ixoy

I'm currently working for them...

O/T is paid at the standard hourly rate in most cases. This means you get paid the same rate working say a Sunday 9am-10am as a Tues. evening 6PM-7PM.
Now you can choose also to get O/T as time in lieu. As standard, Accenture give you the statutory 20 days holiday. Time-in-lieu can build this up: for every hour of O/T time worked, you get one hour off. This is up to a maximum of 75 hours (i.e. 10 days, for a total of 30 days holiday). This option is preferred by many as it's tax free unlike the pay method.
As to the amount of O/T... it'll depend on your project. The company has different projects in different industries and the types of deadlines vary. Won't go into how much I have to do, but it's not particlarly bad on a daily basis and is only noticable by the occassional late evening/weekend work. Other projects do work people a lot harder though...

As to the divisions within the workforce... If you're coming in fresh out of college, you'll most likely enter the Consultant workforce. This is the fast-tracked career model where you're meant to get promoted more frequently.
More experienced people enter the Services or Solutions models. Promotion does NOT work in the same way in these models. Again, it's a bit complex but it's something you should definetely enquire about if you're looking into jobs for them and it was something that many staff feel should be clarified when you join - what are the differences in workforces.

As a company, they're generally okay to work for. Like all places, there's both good and bad sides. On my project anyway, I work with good people so there's a decent working vibe. Do expect though to work fairly hard and to have a good bit expected of you. The rewards are a good name on your CV and, if you can get it, good training too.

Any other questions, throw them at me and I'll do my best to answer.

mick.fr

I already posted a few weeks about Accenture.
The fact some people are doing extra hours in some projects is because :

- Lack of project management skills (Most managers at Accenture are ex-Java developers)
- Lack of technical skills.
- They also sometimes have to speed up to make sure they will respec their own SLA, which is normal.

They have a serious lack of infrastructure consultant (0?) and solutions specialists. Many guys came over from UK and other places to provide the expertise they do not have in house.

I have seen them working for a couple of months this was really funny sometimes.

Anyway people were pretty nice and Accenture is also organising quiet a few nice social events.

Whatever you choose to do, keep in mind Accenture is a good business card anyway, and their customers as well.

pwd

How are you assessed in the job? Are people credited individually with the work they do?

ixoy

pwd wrote:

How are you assessed in the job? Are people credited individually with the work they do?

You're compared against those people at the same level as you across a number of projects. It's not really an individual thing but how good you are relative to your peers.

In terms of promotion/assessment, that depends on your workforce. As a rough basis though, for accreditation it's done in percentages. Only a fixed percent can be "above peer group", another fixed percent "significantly above", and a certain percent have to be "consistent with". These targets pretty much have to be met so there's a bit of shoe-horning potentially involved although I imagine this sort of grading happens in most big firms, IT or otherwise.

pwd

The assessment is based directly on your work, or is it just your manager's opinion, or somewhere in between?

ixoy

pwd wrote:

The assessment is based directly on your work, or is it just your manager's opinion, or somewhere in between?

Somewhere in between. On smaller teams it's more obvious to your manager what your work level is but I've heard complaints from other teams where they claim the manager hasn't a clue what they do, so they shouldn't be assessing them too heavily.

It's actually a little bit more compex than I've said. Essentially it depends on you r manager's ranking. They can put forward a recommendation based on their work but it's senior managers on different projects who meet together and, between them, discuss your rating. These people may or may not know your work level and may only have your manager's report to go on. They may or may not push you as hard as other senior managers but again, I imagine this principle is the same in other companies.

newestUser

I had an interview with these guys once. I didn't get a good first impression from the interviewer, he had a very forced, "fake", "corporate" manner. He also seemed to have a problem with me being involved with a charity society in college (this is an attitude I've since encountered several times amongst corporate types, ie charities are run by gullible dickheads to help other dickheads who don't deserve it).

Lots of people like working for Accenture though, and the company does have its good points. But as you can see from my post, and one or two previous posts, the corporate culture of the company is most definitely not for everyone!

ixoy

I'm surprised about an interviewer having problems with your charity work - the company specifically enables people to take a day off to do charity work. Odd that, as it's not in keeping with an ethos they appear to be trying to promote currently..

As to the "corporate culture" - that'll depend on where you end up. Some areas, particularly the financial projects, would be very much a corporate suite environment where people would, I imagine, "talk the talk" a lot. Others, in the government area (where I'm in), would have a "business casual" approach and there's generally a reasonably degree of casualness between Accenture team members despite working to deadlines. We're certainly allowed joke and chat amongst our selves to a degree that doesn't interfere with work but allows some sort of environment to be created.

newestUser

Kinda forgot while I was spewing out the bile in my previous post to mention that of course, this guy may not be representative of the company, I might have just been unlucky!

But yeah, the charity thing *really* p*ssed me off. He asked me if I'd stop working with the charity if I joined Accenture. And the question wasn't asked because he wanted to know if I'd be prepared to cut back on extra-curriculars if I joined Accenture. I had other college activities on my CV which he was chatting away to me about happily ("hey, my brother does that too!") but when he saw I was involved with a charity, the mood turned and he asked me straight out if I'd stop working with them if I joined Accenture.

As a result, I am somewhat sceptical of Accentures much-bally-hooed charity activities.