Accenture dubs 800k staff 'reinventors' amid shift to AI

Honestly, of all the people that should be sweating LLMs taking their jobs, it should be enterprise consulting folks - especially the ones at places like McKinsey. A large portion of those jobs involve writing bullshit rehashed documentation that nobody reads, which is a specialty of LLMs.

It's so hard to tell whether these people are genuinely stupid, or just pretending to be because that's what they think will be rewarded (and the latter might be correct and a non-stupid thing to do!)

I wonder if anyone will include the "prompt engineer" in their CV/Resume. Otherwise, if one of the future employers decides to crosscheck a title that's anything different than what your current employer wants to call you, then it may lead to a credibility loss.

As long as the compensation goes up, they can call me whatever they want!

Run screaming, do not look back.

Is this a joke? It's so hard to tell these days.

Yikes. Good luck. Hope you've already started the job search.

Perhaps that’s the point.

should have gone with innovationeers

They must have hired McKinsey to advice them.

Haha, I hadn't heard about this before https://www.accenture.com/us-en/services/metaverse

> executives expect 4.2% of their revenues coming from metaverse in the next 3 years—a value of $1 trillion

I wonder if that KPI is still on target.

I regret I have but one upvote to give.

At least with AI there’s some actual value there, the consulting firms have to jump on every trend because they market themselves as “thought leaders”. I expect a lot of AI shake out this year, people will find where it works and where it doesn’t as well as begins to realize AGI isn’t right around the corner. I’ve gone from pretty skeptical to cautiously optimistic about LLMs with respect to code. I was working on something a couple weeks ago and ran out of free tier claude. I was willing to pay the $20 out of my own pocket to keep using it for work tasks. That forced me to rethink my stance.

Accenture is more like a body shop or software factory than a traditional consultancy.

Their business model is based on the fact that most non-tech companies have a deeply seated prejudice against paying software and system engineers high salaries and that most of their software engineering senior leadership is hopelessly out of date in technology, but are well-connected with the rest of the leadership team, and can't be replaced directly by more competent, younger people.

So they spend vastly more money to outsource things to Accenture than they would do paying good salaries to engineers. But then, the idiots at Wall Street are allergic to any dollar spent on salaries, while always thinking dollar wasted on companies like accenture is "investment" and thus "a good thing".

Actually, back in the day Andersens (and EDS) were some of the few companies that could deliver really big systems (for all their faults) e.g. https://accountancyage.com/2000/03/16/andersen-consulting-to... . Each year a number of analysts had nervous breakdowns, I worked with one of them.

Accenture is a big place, it has a “nice part of town” where there’s genuinely good people who do good things. There’s also the boring part of town where they just “turn the crank and go home”. There’s also “the wrong side of the tracks” that’s just career nightmare fuel.

/not admitting I work there but… you know

“Consulting: if you’re not a part of the solution there’s money to be made prolonging the problem” - despair.com

:)

Most of people here think "I will be fine, only the other guy gets fired, programmers always will be needed". And we are tempted by new shiny stuff or we think using llms will help us keep the job but really by agreeing to what is happening and not being skeptic and standing against we dig our career graves. Kind of tragedy.

That was probably the feeling of thousands of scribes when the printing press spread and more people could afford to buy books. The art of writing, including calligraphy, still exists, but primarily as a hobby.

If you are 40 and haven't transitioned from a linear employee to manager or a small shareholder, your trajectory is that of jaded sadness. I write this to those who are still young enough to read and listen.