My life in Accenture before startups - <AUTHOR> http://swombat.com/2011/6/7/accenture-before-startups <comment><USER6> I spent a number of years working as an employee of one of the big IT outsourcers on a Australian government department (better not say which one) contract. During this time I was required to assist a team from Accenture who had won a contract to write some software that needed to be integrated with a number of systems.

Accenture had "all their best people" on the job. This meant almost an entire floor of staff; managers, project managers, BAs, god knows what else. Oh, they also had two young devs, you know, to actually do the work. These two guys were nice, seemed pretty smart, but fresh out of uni had no experience at all and were just so far out of their depth it was embracing. I tried to help them where I could, but didn't get much opportunity.

Accenture originally gave a timeframe of three years for this project, but when I left they were two years in and still not even a working demo in sight. I have no idea if it was ever completed or what happened

<comment><USER7> _> Accenture had "all their best people" on the job. This meant almost an entire floor of staff; managers, project managers, BAs, god knows what else. Oh, they also had two young devs, you know, to actually do the work._

As a dev/architect in Professional Services (not at a big 5 consulting firm), this is way off the mark. PMs and BAs do a ton of work that I either would not want to do or am not good at and while the end product is a bundle of code there is a LOT of work that goes into building it outside of straight development.

<comment><USER6> I tend to write in a hyperbolic way to accentuate the point I'm trying to make. Obviously the BAs et al do a lot of work, but I was trying to contrast the number of non-developers to developers (yes, there were only 2).

I should note that my opinion of BAs is not very high, based solely on the dozen or so I've had to work with. The job sounds worthwhile, and I'm sure there's excellent BAs out there, but the company I used to work for didn't employ any of them (or perhaps the culture was such that the good ones left)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> I left Accenture (Italy) this january, after 3 years, and just like you I was hired right after graduation thanks to my 'mad' java skills, after about 1 year I wasn't writing much code anymore and SQL, Word & Excel became my only daily companions.

 _Negatives/things I didn't like during my experience in Accenture_ :

      - Working 10-14 hours a day (^). If you were to leave at 6pm your supervisor
      would joke about it ("hey, did you get that part-time thing?").
      It's alienating and can be done only if you're young & single.
      You are supposed to immolate yourself for the company.

      - Procedures & timetables to fill: I were required to follow the
      most cumbersome procedures even for the simplier tasks and file every
      single small detail of what I've done in a form somewhere for monitoring
      purposes.
      While this is a good practice in general, what was going on there
      was beyond absurdity. I spent more time reporting what I was doing
      than working on the actual task.

      - Dressing code = compulsory business attire, Suite + tie (!)

      - Managers overlydramatic speeches. Laughable attitude.

      - Strong pyramidal scheme. If your non-technical supervisor closed a deal
      with the client on a specific feature, it didn't matter if it was technically
      unfeasible and risked to put in jeopardy the whole system, you were -ordered-
      to do it. obey. Reworking was then very common.

      - What matter isn't the quality of your work, it's the amount of time
      you spend on it. You're consultants and your company charges the client by
      the hours you do. The more you stay in the office, the better is for the company.
      Optimization? who cares.

      - Most of my coworkers there were really, really, really bored.
      Their life was sucked into the office, and the only thought they had on a
      typical monday morning was how to make it through the next weekend.

_Positives_ :

      - I found some truly talented people, and I learned lots of both technical
      and people skills.

      - You get to learn some self-discipline, especially when it comes to schedule
      your time to reach specific goals.

      - On a professional point of view, I grew up a lot, it's a good 'gym',
      an eye-opener.

Anyway, in all honesty, I'm glad I've been working there and I do not regret it at all. If I were to run a startup right after university, I would have bit off more than I could chew, probably.

(^) I don't mind working 10-14 on my own stuff, things that I'm crafting with my hands and that I find exciting. Pretending to work 14 hours on a bi-monthly report just because you've got to leave at the same time as everybody else is another thing.

<comment><USER9> "What matter isn't the quality of your work, it's the amount of time you spend on it."

So what is the motivation for employing good developers then? If you make more money by taking longer then the sensible thing to do would be to hire _less_ skilled people who talked a good game but were poor at actually doing stuff.

<comment><USER10> The problem here is that considering how these consulting companies are structured, how they work and their size, the capability to hire good developers imho is not even there.

Also, are companies like Accenture chosen by their clients for the incredible quality of their work? I'm also from Italy, so i could have observed something peculiar to this market, but the clients of those big consulting corps (usually from the financial sector or similar) just pick one of the biggest players as a "safe" bet, technical considerations are not part of the decision.

Which big player do they choose and why? I remember a discussion here on HN about "golf course software", that could be the methodology.

<comment><USER11> Client pay for _predictably_ mediocre. It's a scale: pay $X and get Y% probability of the project being done by D date. Of course they don't even get that; in practice, Accenture are as unpredictable as any large-scale software development effort. So rather than mediocre yet safe, you get mediocre, _and_ late, _and_ over budget. LOLZ on you! Or on your poor shareholders/taxpayers more like.

<comment><USER12> When I dealt with Accenture (back when they were Anderson Consulting), they were quite predictable - always late, always over budget, and always producing an unmaintainable mess.

The developers were good or bad in about the same percentages as other companies, but the management structure was designed to suck money out of the client. Work product was secondary (or, whatever) and it showed.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> My story is nearly identical (US, NY). I left after 5 years. No kool-aid drinking here.

Accenture is a culture you either fit into or you don't - a very 'up-or-out' mentality.

Some of the problems that commenters have noted are definitely attributed to the internal culture: an over-emphasis on face-time, long hours with no real work to do, and occasionally selling work that was undeliverable (technically unfeasible, impossible delivery schedule, etc).

Some management was good, a lot of it was poor, and generally the focus was on selling and looking good rather than delivering a viable product. At all levels, you're ranked against your co-workers for a very small number of promotion slots, particularly in recent times. This creates a strange dynamic: you're both trying to work with people at your level to create something useful for a client and prove that you're better/smarter/faster than your peers, some of whom are on the same project and most of whom you've never met.

Many of the complaints, however, are an effect of having large numbers of stakeholders on a complicated project. Clients are often unpredictable, and incented by a completely different set of goals. There's generally a lot of money and a lot of management involved, and people have their careers staked on these projects - disagreement is normal. Rework was extremely common due to constant spec changes, and I had to go to bat for my developers numerous times.

It's not a great work environment. Low and mid level people are generally dropped into a project with no background and the client has been told that they're experts on whatever giant, 30-year-old legacy system that the client is running. They fake it and learn on the job. There's often a hostile reception from the client employees - the perception is that you're a highly paid consultant coming to take their job or fire them. Travel is the norm, and you're expected to work long hours since you aren't going home to a family - just a generic hotel room.

Ultimately, what drove me out was the lack of interesting and rewarding work, the internal politics, and the isolation. Wish I had left sooner, but I hadn't figured out what I wanted.

</comment><comment><USER14> A few years ago I quit my job in academia to go work as a field delivery consultant for a large ERP firm. This whole thing was a ridiculous culture shock to me. I quit because I wanted to try something different -- it was different, all right.

For the first year or so I was doing some development work on the client side as well as requirements gathering and dealing with integration. I was cool with this, because I was doing something technical but wanted something that would flex my people skills as well.

At one point I was tasked with requirements gathering for a customer who wanted some custom work done to their installation of our product. They bought two weeks of my time to draft a spec, and no development -- my deliverable was basically to draft the SOW for the next consultant who was to write a technical design for someone else who was to write code.

I finished the spec, in spite of a client who really was extremely hard to deal with. The client sat on it for a few months and decided they wanted to revisit the issue, so I got on a plane again and spent two more weeks trying to tease some answers out of them so I could revise things.

The final specification amounted to approximately 95 pages including screenshot mockups. The spec went back to the home office, where our development team reviewed it and quoted something like three or four months' time to develop it, test it, and hand off back to the customer for acceptance testing. They planned for the invariable back and forth on that as well. This was in February of that particular year; they were looking at taking the feature live on January 1 of the following year.

The feature they requested? Four simple web forms, the code to validate their input, and a report generator to dump back out what was put into the form.

After we finalized the spec for this I turned in my two weeks and went straight back to academia, where four web forms and a report is something you write, wrap automated tests around, and deploy before lunchtime.

<comment><USER15> > he feature they requested? Four simple web forms, the code to validate their > input, and a report generator to dump back out what was put into the form. > After we finalized the spec for this I turned in my two weeks and went > straight back to academia, where four web forms and a report is something > you write, wrap automated tests around, and deploy before lunchtime.

I think this is a very uneven comparison. Comparing what a decent coder _can do_ as to what is spec'd, negotiated and sold is wildly different.

At the heart of the problem is that consulting agencies and ISVs like Accenture benefit from more "work" being done, so they sell more "work". The product delivered is a consequence.

</comment></comment><comment><USER16> I know a few friends who worked for Accenture (back when it was called Andersen Consulting). I always thought the most fascinating thing (aside from the instant credibility of having the company on your resume) was their training program which was designed to take mostly liberal arts majors and teach them C programming (with unknown long-term success but at least enough to not totally drown at a first client engagement). The training program was very intensive and immersive, and I wonder what became of it and if the basic principles of the program could be applied to retraining willing liberal arts graduates.

<comment><USER10> That was one of the reasons why i politely declined when i was asked if i was interested in a interview for the consulting branch. A place where people with zero experience are hired, trained in a few weeks and them sent to some client as a "consultant"? No, thanks...

<comment><USER17> This is what I love about consulting companies. They get the contract by talking up their experience with the client's business, but once the deal is signed they just scoop a bunch of warm bodies off the street to do the actual work.

<comment><AUTHOR> Not a single one of the projects I worked on or was directly aware of, in 4 years, ever used a subcontractor.

That's anecdotal evidence, but it should clarify that though it no doubt happens (and happened more before there was a Solutions Workforce), it's by no means the norm to hire subcontractors to "do the real work".

<comment><USER17> I'm not talking about subcontractors. Most consultancies, including Accenture in my limited personal experience with them, staff up with new hires (preferably cheap new grads) whenever they get a new contract. When business slows down enough that people are lingering on the bench, they get fired. They are essentially high-end temp agencies.

<comment><AUTHOR> Nope. When business gets slow, they fire the experienced people, who are much more expensive to keep around idle.

<comment><USER18> True. That is the "up or out" model at work. The few that survive such attrition are partner material, meaning they can put up with the lifestyle, enjoy the role of digging through other peoples business, and have potential as sales people.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER19> My experience (off and on-work) with Accenture was horrible.

A small anecdote (out of many):

I visited a good friend of mine, a true math and programming genius, who was in the middle of his PhD at the ETHZ. An acquaintance of my friend started to tell bullshit stories about his "heroic" job at Accenture. An untalented money whore if I ever saw one. If you know nothing and have the moral integrity of a human trafficker, it looks like you end up in consulting @ Accenture.

Buzzwords. Check. "Play the game or get lost" mantras. Check. "People making less than 100k are lazy bastards". Check. "All companies are rotting from within, our external consulting work is basically a gift of god". Check. Blah blah blah. He got a hard on from riling us up, the "naive idealists" we are.

Get real, son.

<comment><AUTHOR> Any company with 100k+ people is going to have its share of idiots. I worked there for 4 years and, in my experience, this type of person was definitely a very small minority.

I'd blame the person rather than the company for this kind of terribly flawed character.

<comment><USER20> Agreed that any company is going to have it's share of idiots, but isn't it the principle job of a company like Accenture to hire competent people? Their business model is to lease out intellectual talent so their principle job is to create talent.

I, like most people commenting here, have worked with a lot of bad Accenture people and am shocked when I do actually meet a good one. Yes, they do exist, but most good people don't stay long (much like yourself) because they realize opportunities outside of Accenture are much more lucrative.

Also, their model is fairly obvious now (like other big 4) - huge margins on Jr Consultants that are lead by competent seniors. When the senior people are incompetent and the juniors are not fast learners then the whole model is broken and thus the assumption that "everyone is idiots".

<comment><USER21> No, theyre only interested in hiring billable people. They're not interested in creating talent or nurturing competencies, they provide numbers (or better, warm bodies to fill the client's chairs) and often subcontract to smaller consultancies when truly competent people are needed on some project.

<comment><USER10> The subcontracting thing alone should be enough to never have anything to do with a company that does it, but usually the clients don't even know/suspect.

Edit: What about the downvotes? is subcontracting a good thing for the client (or for the small consultancies, that could become completely dependent on the contracts from the big players) or something that should be encouraged?

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER22> I can vouch for this. I never worked for any of the big 4, but worked with them on many occasions, when I was a consultant with a much smaller firm (<50 employees when I started, >200 when I left).

Consulting really is a great way to learn the ins and outs of business while earning a good salary and getting to travel. Combine it with writing lots of code and its a fantastic real-world education for a multitude of endeavors.

<comment><USER23> When you put it that way, it sounds exciting.

Sometimes I wish the world had forced me to go and do other things in between my undergrad and my PhD. Once you're on an academic career track it's hard to take a few years off to do something else.

<comment><USER24> You should make sure you get an internship.

I hated school by the time I had my undergraduate CS degree. I took two years in industry, realized I hated it far more than I could have ever imagined, now I am very happy in a PhD program. You need to work to get the perspective (and also to find the useful problems to solve).

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER25> My typical day working for a Big 5 firm:

       7:00 - drive to client in Redlands
       8:00 - arrive in Redlands
       8:42 - client arrives for 8:00 meeting
       8:51 - client leaves for emergency
       8:52 - review project with programmer - still 18 months behind
       9:15 - daily email to 6 bosses about dire status
       9:38 - take call from boss #4 - debate "strategic direction"
      10:20 - coffee, snack, & bitch session with lead programmer
      10:45 - drive to client in Century City
      12:20 - arrive in Century City, everyone at lunch already
      12:30 - have hot dog at sidewalk cafe, look for Christina Applegate
       1:15 - meet with client for daily status
       1:22 - client leaves for emergency
       1:28 - review project with programmer - still 18 months behind
       1:40 - daily email to 5 other bosses about dire status
       2:15 - take call from other boss #3 - debate "strategic direction"
       2:28 - referee dispute between contract & employee programmers
       3:20 - coffee, snack, & bitch session with lead programmer
       4:20 - drive home
       5:50 - arrive home
       8:10 - take calls from 4 other bosses debating strategy
       9:20 - end day knowing tomorrow will be exactly the same
       Total work done: 0

My typical day working for an enterprise:

       7:30 - drive to work
       7:50 - arrive at work, turn on Windows workstation
       7:51 - get coffee, greet co-workers
       8:10 - workstation finally up, check overnight logs
       8:15 - check email
       8:30 - resume programming on current project
       9:15 - take calls from 6 customers, changing scope
      10:00 - go to daily status meeting
      10:12 - everyone else arrives at daily status meeting
      10:48 - drop current project, work on daily emergency
      12:10 - go to lunch at mall foodcourt
       1:00 - check email
       1:10 - resume programming on current project, drop daily emergency
       1:40 - take 4 calls, give project status
       2:00 - go to Special Planning Session for Project #127
       2:12 - others arrive at Special Planning Session for Project #127
       2:48 - candy bar break, bitch with other programmers about code review
       3:10 - resume programming on current project
       4:00 - go to daily stand-up meeting for project status
       4:08 - others arrive at daily stand-up meeting for project status
       4:45 - email project status to 8 bosses
       5:10 - drive home
       5:45 - day ends
       Total work done: 2 hours

My typical day working for a start-up:

       6:00 - <USER5>
       8:00 - breakfast at desk while coding
      10:00 - coffee break outside
      10:10 - <USER5>
      12:00 - lunch at desk while coding
       2:00 - break outside
       2:15 - work on everything else except coding
       4:00 - review & print code
       5:00 - <USER4>
       6:00 - dinner with SO
       7:00 - visit mother, watch Jeopardy & Family Guy with her
       8:00 - <USER5>
      10:00 - turn off monitor, review code, plan next day
      Total work done: 8 hours

<comment><USER26>
        7:50 - arrive at work, turn on Windows workstation
        7:51 - get coffee, greet co-workers
        8:10 - workstation finally up, check overnight logs

You know you can just leave your windows computer on all night too, it will eventually enter sleep mode anyway (takes a few seconds the next day to "wake up") :)

<comment><USER27> That's against policy where I currently work. They also push updates that require a reboot overnight. Lots of big companies I've worked for do that as well.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER24> I remember when I was at university in the UK (a Top 10 one, and Top 5 for Computer Science). One of my graduating friends got hired by Accenture. When he told on of the (well-respected) professors, the professor literally laughed in his face.

I decided not to apply to Accenture.

</comment><comment><USER28> My two favorite quotes about Accenture are:

"Accenture is a great place to be from" <\-- not a great place to be at long term, but your learn a lot, you get to see how the enterprise world works, you make connections with other smart people who will help you for the rest of your professional career, and it is great on a resume.

"At Accenture the great employees leave, the weak are fired, and the mediocre become partners"

<comment><USER29> Have to disagree with the second comment. My experience was that the partners were exceptionally good at their job, which is essentially sales. Perhaps they are mediocre along other measurements? Every single one of them was a workaholic, which I don't find to be an admirable quality, so there's that.

Off topic from this comment thread, but the best part about working for Accenture is the extremely transparent career ladder and laddering process, (at least in the consulting workforce). It's something you only appreciate once you don't have it. I was able to look out 10 years and see that I would gradually be transformed into a workaholic sales guy that makes huge amounts of money. As soon as I figured that out I was out of there.

</comment></comment><comment><USER30> This post really hits home for me. I have friends in consulting and I join a small tech company in bay area instead. I cannot believe when I hear about their experiences with consulting and how miserable they are in their jobs.

The struggle with consulting is that you never get to 'own' any decisions. There is not much accountability between conception, design and implementation. From my experience with big three consulting firms, they are brought in by execs to either 'validate' a path that was already determined or to get contract work done for short-term. In both cases, there is very little impact you can have on the overall business.

In my experience, if you want to be a good entrepreneur, get a job where you can own decisions and implementation. You will make mistakes, but you will learn from them and can implement those learnings in your startup.

</comment><comment><USER31> Interesting discussion here. A few things spring to mind:

\- Consulting training still has an element of programming, but I suspect that will go when Core Analyst School moves to Bangalore later this year. The value is not that those guys will ever code, but to give them a feel for the types of problems that the engineers face.

\- Solutions delivery (offshore or on) has pretty much taken development work off the plate of a consulting analyst.

\- Consulting recruitment is swinging to favour engineering and technical disciplines more than it has historically.

\- This group naturally favours high risk/high reward, deep technical competance, and engineering as a craft. This is antithetical to firms like Accenture that favour low risk (imply your own corrollary), relationships and business knowledge, and engineering as an industry. This is also favoured by our clients, which is why it's a very successful business.

\- I've seen some projects in pretty dire straits, and I've seen over- committments. I've also seen some very effective cross-discipline teams dealing very well with difficult client situations. I've met a lot of very impressive people, and I've learnt a great deal from them.

\- It's a truism that Accenture wouldn't be there unless there was a difficult business problem that the client felt that they couldn't solve on their own. Sometimes they couldn't have, but more frequently, in my experience, they could have done it themselves if it weren't for a paralysing fear of change.

\- Internally, the firm changes org structure most years. This results in a very strong culture of personal network above business organisation. People are astonishingly willing to help someone they've never met, even when they are on the other side of the planet, and there's absolutely nothing in it for themself.

\- I've never seen behaviour that I would regard as remotely unethical.

\- The comment about NHS is right - Accenture UK took a massive financial hit, which resulted in a promotion freeze, and pay rises of less than inflation that year.

\- My feeling at the moment is that Management Consulting will become much more distinct from Technology, which in turn will become more like a "normal" technology company.

Finally, it strikes me as a bit ironic that no one has yet highlighted the similarities between a "classic" Accenture project team and a startup. Both arrogantly believe that they can change things for the better by working very hard, learning a lot as they go and blending a variety of hard and soft skills. Sound familiar?

<comment><USER9> It sounds like you work for Accenture, out of interest, have you ever worked at a startup?

[Edit: I'm not asking to be snarky, just curious as I know a few people who have worked for big consulting firms and who now work for early stage companies and who relish the difference in environment. I was curious to see if anyone has gone in the other direction.]

<comment><USER32> I worked at Accenture for 10 years and am on my second yC-funded company after leaving there. While I would never go back to that environment, I praise it for what it is to this day. I strongly believe more than ever you just need to understand yourself and "how you're built" and choose the environment that is most appropriate for you. And that may change over time like it did for me. But some people don't like the risks inherent in startups, or they need more structure to their day and know they don't do good with minimal direction and if that's the case, a place like Accenture is a pretty good place to work.

I wouldn't give back the skills I learned at Accenture and they've been invaluable for working on Inkling, our first B2B business. From day 1 I knew how to deal with large corporate cultures, understood the procurement process, how to manage projects, create a budget, write proposals, deal with various personalities, run a meeting and conduct workshops, conference call etiquette. It may sound simplistic, but I can't tell you the number of deals I've seen blown up simply because people don't really understand the business of business. Those skills are a lot harder to pick up in a startup.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER33> As a current Analyst (1 year out of college now) at Accenture, I have a few points to add:

Positives:

\- Accenture greatly helps develop one's people skills and networking skills which can help prepare you for a startup. Building these skills in college is difficult, so jumping into a professional setting right after college helps.

\- The work enables you to understand real-world problems that clients are facing, so you have a better base of ideas upon which you can launch a startup (see <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2634665>)

\- In working with enterprise software, you gain an appreciation of how complex (and how messed-up) some of this software can be. Enterprise software is incredibly different from typical software created for the masses in some cases. It is also rarely user-friendly. Compared to consumer software, enterprise software has much less documentation and support available, so you learn to figure things out with missing information.

Negatives (or "Deltas" in Accenture terminology):

\- The work is not always interesting and engaging. Since it's consulting, you sometimes have to work on the boring, but necessary things, and to deal with several levels of managers. Furthermore, working for someone else (vs. your own startup) makes inspiration or dedication hard to summon at times.

\- Change is slow in enterprise software. Unlike a startup where you can think of a new feature and implement it in a day, it can take months or years to go from inception to roll-out for a new feature or innovation. There are so many stakeholders that must be satisfied, and so much red tape to break. These restricitions can stifle your personal creativity.

\- Working hours are inflexible and excessive. Management sets the expectation that you must be in the office and working before the client arrives and long after the client leaves. This leaves little room for work-life balance, which gets very frustrating. On a positive note, however, everyone at Accenture in the consulting workforce (in the US at least) gets five weeks of paid time off per year (on an accrual basis).

Overall, Accenture is helping my professional growth and positioning me to later start my own startup company. It's certainly a worthwhile experience and a useful precursor to entreprenurialism.

<comment><USER34> Is it just me, or do all of the ex- or current Accenture people posting here sound like Amway salesmen or cult members.

<comment><USER33> It's funny you say that - there's a lot of Kool-Aid drinking that goes on at Accenture (or any other corporate consulting brand for that matter). Re- reading my post, it does look a bit sales-ish.

Regardless, from my experience, there are quite a few people in the company with cult-like loyalty. The majority, however, (myself included) maintain a pretty healthy dose of skepticism and pragmatism.

<comment><USER34> I'm glad to hear that. Most of the Accenture people I've engaged with on a personal level share that skepticism and pragmatism.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER35> Great post! I came from consulting into start-up world also (although I'm non- technical) and while you definitely have to re-learn many things to adjust to building a company, there are many many valuable lessons from working in that environment that entrepreneurs are all too quick to dismiss.

But the bottom line of your post is definitely the right summary: Do what feels right when it feels right, and you'll be fine. You can't lose when you're choosing between multiple interesting options. And as soon as your current path becomes uninteresting, look elsewhere.

Thanks for posting.

</comment><comment><USER36> I've looked into consulting as a potential career, not with a behemoth like Accenture, but with smaller more specialized boutique shops (Art & Logic) or mid-size ones (Thoughtworks).

All I really want is a wide array of domain experience in different verticals, and travel to lots of different places. However, everyone I've interacted with has painted the services business as a cruel and hierarchical (and underpaid) place.

That coupled with the fact that they seem to be so disorganized they never even get back to you has left me pretty discouraged about the space.

<comment><USER37> I'd be surprised if you heard about ThoughtWorks' professional services as cruel, hierarchical and underpaid.

I imagine we're more the source of the 'so disorganized they never even get back to you' part, right? If so, I apologize for that. If you really did just get dropped by recruiting then shoot me an email and I can rouse the right people.

<comment><USER36> Emailed you. Thanks :)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER38> ok so this is in Asia, i can't say how we operate in the bigger offices: i feel that Accenture's one of the few companies that can provide you with maximum exposure and experience in the shortest amount of time...there are ups and downs but on the whole if you work well, you'll see great results...

</comment><comment><USER39> I work for Accenture R&D in San Jose, CA. Everything I've read here is very different than my typical work day. We're hiring analysts (entry level) and consultants (experienced hires) to work in our research lab. Both on the Research (typically PhD) and Development (typically BA/MA) sides. Click on my username and you'll find my email if you'd like to apply.

The people I work with are doing things like studying NoSQL databases (Cassandra, Riak, HBASE), MapReduce (Hadoop, Cloud MapReduce), cryptography, biometrics, language/sentiment analysis, data visualizations, cloud computing (Amazon, Rackspace, VMWare) etc. We're not like the typical consulting arm of Accenture. We're also not like a typical theory focused research lab.

We're a fun bunch. Recent company sponsored trips have included sailing the bay, indoor skydiving at iFly, snowboarding in Tahoe, white water rafting, wine tasting, hiking, a vegas trip and behind the scenes tour of the SF Giants stadium. We're also known to throw some pretty wicked happy hours.

<comment><USER39> Oh, here's our group's website: accenture.com/techlabs

</comment></comment><comment><USER40> As a college student, I've been thinking about working as a consultant so I can survey a variety of different businesses in a variety of industries and see how they operate. Seems like it might be a good preparation for being an entrepreneur. (See this comment of mine for further justification: <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=2635564.>)

Does this sound like a good plan? What would the best consulting firm to work for be? Ideally I'd like to see as wide a variety of businesses as possible, and ideally they'd be well run businesses I could steal ideas from. But even, say, seeing a bunch of poorly run businesses seems like it could be really valuable.

</comment><comment><USER41> "The height of absurdity was reached, I believe, when I was asked to prepare the proposal for the preparation of a plan to produce a proof of concept for a module of a tool the client was implementing."

Wow, that sounds pretty inane.

<comment><AUTHOR> The best part was my manager, at the time, taking me aside and giving me a little speech on how I should be honoured that the client was getting me involved this early in the project - that typically only senior managers and partners got involved so early in a project, and that as a consultant I should realise that this was a great opportunity to help the client define what needed to be done, etc.

In the meantime, I was busy working on not one but two startups on the side, so although I nodded agreement (you have to be political..), I wasn't particularly awed by the chance to work on this particular bit of work :-)

The rest of the project, once I got into managing the actual delivery of the module, was much more sensible. And of course it didn't quite follow the plan. Nothing ever does.

</comment></comment><comment><USER42> I'm glad you wrote this, Daniel! I applied to Accenture three times, in my final year of undergrad, a year after graduating and then again when I was doing my Master's. I only got to the final stage of interviews once, and apparently cocked it up simply because I didn't exhibit my listening skills (despite, as I was coached, being the whiteboard monkey in the group exercise).

I was devastated - I had felt challenged by the recruitment process and was excited at the prospect of working there. Somehow now I feel a little better about taking a different path in life. :)

</comment><comment><USER43> Seriously, since when is Accenture considered Prestigious? It's not even a top consulting shop.

[http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/McKinsey_%26_Company#Competitor...](http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/McKinsey_%26_Company#Competitors)

<comment><USER44> Big 3 of consulting: McKinsey, BCG, Bain - These are all strategy only.

Accenture was the consulting arm of Arther Anderson which was one of the Big 5 of accounting (Enron brought them down.)

Accenture is known for implementation/technology/strategy. Along with Deliotte, CapGemini, Booz, etc. These firms differentiate themselves with implementation from the Big 3 that are strategy only.

<comment><USER45> Accenture is more known for bungling giant contracts and sucking money out of nearly-bankrupt organizations.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER46> Interesting post. What was that bit about the three heads?

<comment><USER47> He's suggesting that the only qualification Accenture required of prospective new employees was having the correct number of heads.

<comment><USER23> The fact that there's not already some law against this can only be attributed to the weakness of the pushmepullyou rights lobby.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER11> _but which I saw I could now do with almost all subject areas._

Mmm, but you can't tho'. No-one can. What consultants do is fake expertise, then actually learn it on the time the client is paying for an expert. Not that that isn't a skill mind, but don't confuse it for something it's not.

<comment><AUTHOR> I never mentioned anything about expertise. What I said was:

 _I also gained a lot of confidence in my abilities to pick up and absorb new things and become productive quickly - something that I knew I could do with technologies, but which I saw I could now do with almost all subject areas._

I think you're letting a prejudiced opinion of consultants get in the way of the article.

<comment><USER11> I believe that you believe it, and can make others believe it, Accenture spent a lot of money training you to, but c'mon, you can be productive in any subject quickly? Really? Have you tried it in anything that was truly outside of your comfort zone?

I'm an ex-Consultant myself, like you right out of college, so I know about this from the inside.

<comment><AUTHOR> Any topic that involves advanced maths or other hard science will be hard to pick up quickly (despite doing a Physics degree), but other than those, most business-related activities tend to be fairly straightforward to pick up, so long as you have the right "learning materials" (be it work samples, manuals, people to coach you, whatever makes sense for the activity).

Sure, there's a world of difference between "being productive" and "being an expert", but again, I'm not saying you can become an expert in a week, I'm saying you can be productive.

Moreover, I'd argue that with the right coaching/motivation/environment, most smart people can do this.

<comment><USER9> Out of interest, what business areas did you do projects in?

<comment><AUTHOR> Financial services. In order of appearance in the movie:

\- Investment banking (primary/secondary market issue)

\- Risk Reporting

\- HR / Performance Management

\- Prime Brokerage / Hedge Funds

\- Middle Office Reconciliations

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER48> Inspiring!</comment>


Ask HN: What does your org chart look like? - <AUTHOR> I'm interested in knowing what senior level roles you have in your organisation, and more importantly why. How essential is a CTO? Where do you put the boundary between "operations" and "development", or do you go full devops? <comment><USER2> For a previous role at a fintech company, we did have a CTO and a few engineering managers managing each of the various tech teams. In our organization, we had web development, operations, integration (which builds development tools and sets up testing infrastructure), internal development (builds admin tools), product development (consisting of web, mobile and other business-specific dev teams)

I think the necessity of the CTO depends on the technical savyness of the other executives although an effective CTO will always be able to highlight challenges the tech teams are facing, lobby for resources when necessary and provide sufficient support to make sure the tech side of things is working well.

</comment><comment><USER3> 3 co founders , one of them acting as cto for 6 people dev team , other 2 co founders do legal and marketing. Below 3 co founders we have 3 managers managing a support team (they also do support themself). We do not have sales , growing organically for now.

</comment><comment><USER4> I asked about org structure options for growing companies recently, but didn't get any responses: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15006425](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15006425)

Hope this post has better traction. Look forward to the answers.

</comment><comment><USER5> How big are you, and what are the cofounders core skills?

Getting a 500 person org setup founded by 3 lawyers would not apply to a 3 person startup founded by engineers.</comment>


She'll Text Me, She'll Text Me Not - <AUTHOR> http://nautil.us/issue/33/attraction/shell-text-me-shell-text-me-not <comment><USER3> I've read a few comments deriding the complexity of this analysis. However, I think it is worth identifying it as a fact that, noticed or not, there is something of a power struggle in the early stages of the human courtship ritual.

Here, this issue is that of availability. Given that it is sometimes difficult to gauge the desirability of a prospective partner, one metric is how eager they seem to be. If the other replies quickly, this is an indication that they are quite eager, which suggests that they have few encounters, and that therefore few have evaluated this person as attractive. On the contrary, a bit of a lapse before a response suggests that the other feels a bit of indifference toward you, and that therefore the person is likely to have more encounters, and therefore is considered more attractive.

You can be forgiven for wishing for more simplicity, given that relationships in most media are depicted rather one-dimensionally, as the result of unambiguous and mutual attraction. This is not how it tends to work in the real world.

<comment><USER4> I used to respond immediately because I'm not a fan of playing games but now I never do, mostly because nobody else does it either. But that is only when I text. I NEVER text these days. I'd rather call. I'm impatient and I'd rather have a short quick conversation than one uncomfortable one that stretches over days.

You can easily spot the fakers from the ones who are actually unavailable though. My ex before we broke up used to take days and days to respond but she was unemployed and had nothing going in her life, whereas I had super busy professors in big labs who for some reason respected my time enough to get back to me within 24 hours or 48 hours at most.

<comment><USER5> > My ex before we broke up used to take days and days to respond but she was > unemployed and had nothing going in her life

Not to speak of your ex specifically. But this could just be a case of "shitty at replying to texts", which I also have (in relation to my mother and some of my friends, but not to other friends or my girlfriend). It's not necessarily about being a faker.

<comment><USER4> Not really, depending on what type of text it was she'd reply instantaneously. Also, honestly in this day and age is it really appropriate to take at minimum 4 days to respond to a question from your "significant other"? That is not normal. Everyone is always on their phone, like she was. In any case, regardless of whether she was faking it or not, it's difficult to maintain a relationship with someone who is always either unavailable or unreliable. Eventually I start to mimic their stiffness despite how well intentioned I may be and how petty I may think my actions are.

<comment><USER6> > Also, honestly in this day and age is it really appropriate to take at > minimum 4 days to respond to a question from your _" significant other"_? > That is not normal. [emphasis added]

This is the real problem. Once you're dating someone (that is, it's past the courtship part and you've acknowledged the relationship), if you can't check your communication devices at least once or twice a day for messages from them (excluding hectic work/life schedules), there's a problem. You're continuing the game from courtship, you don't respect them, or you aren't actually into the relationship.

EDIT: Added 'once or '. I realize this is a YMMV moment, but even if you don't carry your phone during the day (like me), you can check it when you wake up and before bed. And if you're interested/invested in someone, you've got to make more time than that or there's never an actual conversation.

<comment><USER7> I once dated a girl who had two jobs and a kid. I frequently wouldn't get responses back for days. I tried to keep it going, but it fell apart after four months of one date every two or three weeks. In retrospect, I'm glad it did end, even though I was super into her.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER3> Why wouldn't one just call and avoid all this nonsense? It doesn't eliminate the wiles and ways by which we seek to gain the upper hand in a sapling relationship, but it does introduce a touch of humanity into the exchange which, in addition to being consoling, reduces wasted time and useless stress.

A call is an unambiguous yet still unstated expression of continued interest. Is the other party still interested? If the call is answered, you can tell from the tone of voice alone, and if there's uncertainty, the sound of your voice may be enough to tip the balance. What's better, broaching the difficult questions is less difficult on the phone: you don't need to ask explicitly what you would in text, nor need you come up with some lame quip or foist one of your few common experiences to have a conversation. If there's no answer, leave a message -- at the very least, you're not likely to be ignored.

This approach has the added benefit of distinguishing yourself from your texting, cowardly competitors.

Neither method is as good as a face-to-face encounter, but at least this way you reduce the risk of miscommunication or one of those alienating situations where the next-day text goes unanswered.

<comment><USER8> You are probably right but in general ever since texting became a thing I neve call anyone anymore until after I've texted. I don't mean dates I mean everyone. I know this is not objective, I grew up without texts and used to call people all the time. Now though it just seems rude. I might be interrupting, they might be busy, it might be the worst possible time to call, maybe they're driving, maybe they're in a movie and forgot to turn off their phone. With that kind of thinking in my head it feels rude. I first text, ask if it's a good time to call, call.

<comment><USER3> I think this approach would reduce one's probability of a successful outcome. It may actually be preferable that the call be somewhat unexpected, because receiving a call, particularly at this point in history, is a bit disarming.

<comment><USER8> You could be right on that. My feeling is either they're interested or they're not. If they are interesting they'll be happy to hear from me. If they're not I'm not interested in trying to change their mind.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> When I first met my fiance a few years ago, I had been on my 40ish online date and she her 3rd. I had all these rules about gauging girls' interest, mostly to protect myself from pain of rejection. Wait a day or two, text, not more than 2 lines, wait for a few hours, if no response, remove number promptly from phone. After every successful date, I sent my fiance a text asking her out again or to make small talk and I would get a response back anywhere from 9 hours to 24 hours and sometimes up to 48 hours later. The joke I tell people about our early courtship is that I deleted my fiance's number 10 times. Once I decided that her unpredictable texting shouldn't be a dealbreaker, life got much easier. After a while I just accepted that she's a horrible texter, and still remains one to this day.

Some people just aren't big on technology, as crazy as that sounds. My fiance doesn't work in tech, doesn't have a laptop, barely uses her phone. In fact, its one of the things I have come to love about her because it has helped me detach and be more mindful.

</comment><comment><USER10> The best time to search for funding is when you don't need it.

The best time to search for a job is when you don't need it.

The best time to search for a partner is when you don't need it.

I got my current girlfriends after two years of being single and realizing that being single is okay.

<comment><USER11> Do your current girlfriends know about each other? :P

<comment><USER12> The secret is letting them both know they are the one you are cheating with, not the one you are cheating on.

<comment><USER10> Interesting idea. But no, they know of each other. No probs.

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER13> I met about 400+ girls last summer and I became very good at texting.

Rule #1, never get mad or upset at them by text. Ever.

Rule #2, never appear weak or unsure. Never qualify what you say.

Rule #3, girls 99% of the time respond but people get busy. Sometimes I want to respond to a text but I want my mind to be more clear or I get distracted. Or you just don't feel so social. Or you are depressed, sick, busy etc. Some are in school and working. Some have boyfriends.

Sometimes girls don't respond until the next day and occasionally they don't respond at all. But then just wait and in 1 or 2 weeks, send a friendly photo, casually invite them to an invite or say a funny joke or observation.

People get busy and a lack of response means nothing.

Also I like to invite them places or tell them what I am doing. But going out is a lot of energy and money. And some don't like crowds.

So at some point, you should be direct, or ask them on a proper date or what not. But never confide via text how much you like someone, unless you already hooked up.

And sometimes I'll send a dangerous text, like I told this girl to call me whenever she felt like being "dirty" with a bit of provocative language. She did not respond to it. But she responded and I just push forward. Never look back, never apologize (generally speaking).

There is no such thing as a friend zone. You can be just friends but occassionally flirt and don't diminish yourself as a sexual being. Lack confidence? Work out, take a class.

And if you don't look like Brad Pitt or aren't noticeably rich, the girls might not stumble over each other to get to you.

But you can get them. Girls don't know what they want, they are easily persuaded and lazy. (This goes for all people.)

<comment><USER14> Sorry but 400? What?

<comment><USER13> I meant to clarify. I volunteered at a hostel this summer doing activities. So every morning I had to talk to girls at breakfast and invite them to hikes or beer pong.

I also met a dozen girls or so girls a week out in LA. I was going out almost every day and night though.

I also had a friend with a ridiculously amazing condo so I'd bring girls there. The condo didn't help that much but the confidence probably did.

Even with all this, it was exhausting and annoying to meet girls. 99% seem uninteresting and mean; only text me to invite them somewhere. And I was just friends with most.

I'm somewhat of a misanthrope. People in general are selfish and weird. Accepting people as flawed creatures and focusing on the positives have helped a lot.

Edit- Travelling and staying in hostels rejuvenated my faith in others. I highly recommend it.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER15> Yeesh. Finding a girlfriend in college and getting married not too long after graduation remains the best decision I've ever made. I don't know how people deal with this shit.

<comment><USER16> I'm in the same boat, but it depends on who you are as a person. As stressful as dating can be, I can see the appeal vs being tied down. Some people even love the stress.

I _love_ being married, but some of my friends would be miserable if they were. To each their own!

<comment><USER15> Oh sure. Obviously it works for some people. I'm just saying I don't understand it. :)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER17> 1) for me one of the merits of text communication is that it's asynchronous: there is a space to delay message processing for as long as recipient needs. Setting yourself to expect immediate response under such circumstances is bound to cause frustration.

2) intentionally delaying the response just for the sake of making yourself more desirable sounds very manipulative to me, and I'd be very inclined to stop pursuing emotional connection with person who does this.

</comment><comment><USER18> Waiting for a particular person's attention is like overeating: it made sense in hunter-gatherer tribes, but it's not the best idea in modern cities.

</comment><comment><USER19> Sorry this is a bit of an un-HN comment

> A few months later I ran into Tanya. We had a lot of fun together and she > eventually told me that she was sorry she didn't get back to me that time. > Apparently at the time she was questioning her entire sexual identity and > was trying to figure out if she was a lesbian.

I had this, but slightly different, from the other side recently. Met this great girl, got on really well, talked on Facebook for weeks, there was definitely some of this "How long should I wait?" going on. But, unfortunately for her this coincided with me questioning my gender. As time was going on things were progressing well with her, but it felt more and more like I was lying to her and leading her on. I didn't know how to go about telling her, it's not the kind of thing you can tell someone you don't know that well, let alone someone you are flirting with... In the end I noobed out and stopped talking to her. I felt so guilty, I'm sure she was wondering what she did or said. I have since apologised and told her why.

> Well, that was definitely not a theory that crossed my mind.

I think that was pretty much exactly what she said.

<comment><USER20> To be fair, she did say "no more games."

She's sending mixed signals, which is human. Unfortunately, the author weighted the two disproportionally.

</comment></comment><comment><USER21> My experience is: If you have to use tactics, it won't work in the long run.

And if you think it's smart to deliberately model yourself on a neglectful, mildly sociopathic personality, shame on you.

</comment><comment><USER22> There were many things wrong with how Aziz approached the situation. Firstly, he should NOT have invited her to a big concert right away: concerts/events are a big commitment, time and attention-wise. If he had just met the person, the best thing to do would probably have been to meet for coffee/drinks, get to know each other better and THEN propose going to the concert IN PERSON.

Secondly, there are a lot of factors why people will not text you back. Aziz is basically trying to understand why a girl he hooked up with did not text him back. There can be SO many reasons why; but primarily, she was just not that into him. If she was, then she WOULD have found time. She WOULD have found his attempt to find common ground, to find something they both liked, charming.

<comment><USER6>
      "Hey—don't know if you left for NYC, but Beach House
       playing tonight and tomorrow at Wiltern. You wanna go?
       Maybe they'll let you cover The Motto if we ask nicely?"

1) She was going to be leaving soon, so a second meeting needed to be set up soon, or it would get stretched to some unknown point in the future.

2) He knew she enjoyed the music, they'd listened to it the night before. So while a concert is a time commitment, he at least knew it was one she might be interested in.

3) He gave her both that day and the next as options for the date.

4) He referenced both the music they'd listened to while together and her singing at the party. Reinforced the shared experience, and pointed out that he was paying some attention to her.

He did fine. See the note at the end about their second encounter when she said there'd be no games the second time around, and she went right back to it. The lack of reply was all on her, he did everything he could/should have done (much more would've been inappropriate since they didn't yet have much of a connection, and less would've been doing nothing which he'd likely have regretted for the missed opportunity).

</comment></comment><comment><USER23> My strategy when I meet a girl I like is to exchange numbers, but have no intention of contacting them. The girl always has to contact the guy first. It's just how it works.

<comment><USER24> >The girl always has to contact the guy first. It's just how it works

That seems a bit childish.

<comment><USER4> Not only that, it seems like an ineffective strategy. I can't imagine you'd get more than a 10% response rate from this - and that's if you are exceedingly attractive. If you are just an average joe, this strategy basically does not work. If I had enough things going on in my life though I'd also always wait for the woman to contact me first because I've been used and manipulated too many times and don't see most women as worth the effort.

<comment><USER25> I'd make a wager that the original commenter we're referring to is from the UK.

Men initiating interest with women isn't a universal cultural standard and that's one of the places where women asking men out is much more common.

<comment><USER23> I am from the UK.

<comment><USER25> Nailed it. :D

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER26> This all feels a bit silly as I'm not terribly convinced time-between-texts conveys much about the process (THE BRAIN) generating said data points.

The flow chart for "Should I reply to this right now?" is pretty complicated; recovering that PGM is hard!

And as for signaling "busyness" \-- that's better accomplished through delaying showing you "read" their messsage, no?

Is there a missing niche for a whatsapp wrapper that delays "read" confirmations by 3 minutes?

</comment><comment><USER27> Is it only me that finds this type of obsessive-compulsive over-thinking somewhat bizarre; yet the author is trying to pass it off as the norm.

Perhaps it's the author's fretful nature and over analysis that drives women away?

I've found the following 'tactics' have worked quite well: \- If you want to send a message, send a message. \- If they don't reply, they're busy, or they don't want to speak with you.

How is it any more complicated than that?

<comment><USER28> What are you going to say next -- that love is really simple?

<comment><USER27> No, but there's no need to render it more complicated than it has to be.

If the person on the other side loses interests because you are indeed being yourself, take it as an advantage. If they don't want to make the effort in the period when they _should_ make the effort, they've saved you time.

The flipside, of course, is that if you're somewhat like the author and have an fretting behavioural trait, you'll probably scare off a lot of people - which is still a good thing. The ones that stay are worth your time.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER29> Text are asynchronous by nature. Expecting an immediate response is selfish. You expect the other person to carry their phone, check their phone constantly, and drop everything to respond to your (usually dumb) message? Maybe that works with family, but not understanding the nature of asynchronous messaging will hurt the sender a lot more than the receiver. Yes, people sometimes play games, but most of the time they probably have lives (some people still work and such during the day for example). The worst of the worst is when someone gets angry because you didn't respond __when they wanted you to __. Those people do not deserve anyone 's friendship.

</comment><comment><USER30> I realize that this is an inquiry from another era, but people find it acceptable that other people know when they have read a text? Isn't that pretty intrusive?

<comment><USER6> IMs had that feature in the 90s, so at least for the digital era it's not abnormal for most of us. Professionally, we use read-receipts in emails in my office.

<comment><USER7> I don't mind IM's showing the 'read' bit, but for some reason I've always found read receipts on emails rude, and when it pops up the prompt to send the receipt back I _always_ hit 'Cancel'. I wonder why.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER31> Two interesting and somehow opposite aspects of modern culture, we seek instant gratification and we willingly delay communication.

I wonder if there is a relationship between the two.

<comment><USER32> We're willing to gratify ourselves, while withholding the gratification of others?

</comment></comment><comment><USER33> ...my strategy on the other hand, is to drag one conversation over days/weeks, with several hours/days of (not intentional) gaps in between, and act as if it's a single ongoing unbroken conversation.

Not the optimal strategy, but I'm amazed that a ball of grains, dairy and fruits managed to get that for anyway, so everything is a win.

</comment><comment><USER34> Just call her or ask her before she leaves.

Women are allowed to call you too btw.

</comment><comment><USER35> If your attraction to someone is determined by whether they have a 1 minute or 10 minute response time, then maybe you should reexamine your priorities.

<comment><USER36> You're assuming that attraction is rational and a matter of choice. Think about it. Isn't the world is wonderful because it isn't?

<comment><USER17> Attraction sometimes is not a matter of choice, but actions are. You can decide to continue communication with someone or not. You're not a slave of your attraction.

<comment><USER36> Sometimes it's nice to be, right?

<comment><USER17> Nope. Attraction is a nice thing to feel, but it's generally more satisfying if you act on it with conscious choice and not feel "forced" to do something just because you feel a certain way.

<comment><USER11> I don't think that's how attraction works :(

Maybe building a stable, committed relationship -- something that not all people want, by the way, and that's ok -- is an exercise in restraint and rationality, but immediate attraction and hookups? It works irrationally almost by definition.

<comment><USER17> My point is not about how attraction works, it's about what people do about it. You can feel attraction and decide to act on it almost instantly, but that's still your choice and you are responsible for what you do. But if you feel that attraction is "making you do something" against your will, when you realize negative consequences of your actions – that's definition of addiction.

<comment><USER11> What I'm arguing is that attraction bypasses the mechanisms of will and rational decision. We are not logical robots. Most of us do not "decide" to like another person.

Falling in love or feeling sexually attracted to someone are irrational things by definition. You do not decide to do it. You cannot force yourself to feel attracted to someone because they "play fair", either. Because of (reasonable) society norms, you cannot simply engage with everyone you're sexually attracted to -- it's not ok to harass fellow coworkers, or someone else's partner, etc. But the core of it is irrational. You cannot impose rational rules like "I'll pay more attention to people who text me back immediately or who are more considerate of other people, or who I agree with on serious issues, even though what I'd _really_ like is to call X and do the naughty all night long".

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER37> 'the status of my text message changed to "read."'

I am assuming this is an iPhone "feature"? Creepy. Can it be disabled?

<comment><USER38> iMessages, facebook, whatsapp, ... Unfortunately every messaging platform (except old school texts, but iPhones will automatically send iMessages to other iPhones) seem to have implemented this "feature"

<comment><USER6> It's optional in iMessages, I believe it's opt-in (not 100%, changed the setting a long time ago to have it on, personal preference).

That said, it was creepy when I realized the only reason it was enabled on my ex-girlfriend's phone (she didn't like it and is tech-illiterate) was that her _previous_ boyfriend had enabled it to see if/when she read his messages (creepy dude that'd send her flowers randomly two years after their break up, but she thought it was sweet and that they were "just friends", yeah, sure).

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER39> TIL guys are openly hostile to solid dating advice

<comment> Trill-I-Am It's not very welcome when it's this complicated. Injecting social artifices into something as seemingly simple as text communication is frustrating. How often do any of us think about the emotional impact of the timing of a text message in any other context?

</comment></comment><comment><USER40> So TL;DR:

Uncertain reply-time-window dynamics enabled by the era of asynchronous/deferred indirect communication (aka "texting"/"emailing") create a situation where the psychological principles of the Variable Ratio Reinforcement Schedule ([https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reinforcement](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reinforcement)) kick in, which, as it turns out, is the most addicting, thus creating the most drama.

I get that about right? ;)

Word to the wise (single men): Online dating apps put much more power into the hands of women than men. If you want to score something "out of your league," you're going to have to take a walk out of the ballpark, and get your hands dirty in the real world with some face-to-face time. Uncoincidentally, this takes advantage of _another_ psychological principle, Repeated Proximity Breeds Attraction ([https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mere- exposure_effect](https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mere-exposure_effect))

<comment><USER41> The chauvinism in this comment is insane. Women aren't points on a scoreboard and dating dynamics aren't meant to be a power struggle.

<comment><USER42> > The chauvinism in this comment is insane. Women aren't points on a > scoreboard

This commenter, the type that is OUTRAGED by speech that hasn't been mangled to be politically correct, is responsible for muffling open and honest communication among people. Specific to this example, there is nothing wrong with the OP's use of _scoring_ \- the outraged expressed by the commenter above is basically trolling for a response by feigning outrage.

<comment><USER43> Well, I wasn't outraged before, but I have to admit that I may be feeling a touch of outrage now.

The "mangling" of speech to be politically correct and the "muffling" of open and honest communications that some of us are asking for is just this: changing "score something 'out of your league'" to, e.g., "meet someone 'out of your league.'" I'm not sure why people see this as so hard to swallow.

There may be someone "trolling for a response by feigning outrage" in this conversation, but I don't think it's GP.

<comment><USER44> I strongly agree with this criticism of the language (I winced reading it), but I also agree that the way it was criticised here was unnecessarily inflammatory.

There are many people who are not sympathetic to calls for PC language, and including accusations of "insane chauvinism" isn't going to make them any more palatable.

<comment><USER43> Fair enough. I agree that the comment could have been more carefully worded. Note, though, that this does not (I hope!) explain the cool reception (to put it mildly) to my own comments in the same vein.

<comment><USER45> The comment was, well, offensively chauvinist.

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER46> > One area where there was a lot of debate was the amount of time one should > wait to text back. Several people subscribed to the notion of doubling the > response time. (They write back in five minutes, you wait 10, etc.) This way > you achieve the upper hand and constantly seem busier and less available > than your counterpart. Others thought waiting just a few minutes was enough > to prove you had something important in your life besides your phone. Some > thought you should double, but occasionally throw in a quick response to not > seem so regimented (nothing too long, though!). Some people swore by waiting > 1.25 times longer. Others argued they found three minutes to be just right. > There were also those who were so fed up with the games that they thought > receiving timely responses free of games was refreshing and showed > confidence.

Until that last sentence, I had to wonder what's wrong with people. Who enjoys these games? If I'm available, read your message and have time to answer, you'll receive an answer immediately. Pretending to be busy, upper hands - <USER2> get the idea, yet I really don't think it's preferable to being yourself.

<comment><USER47> Also, doubling response time every time is essentially exponential backoff, a strategy I mainly use when trying to let an uncomfortable discussion die gracefully.

<comment><USER18> I think HN uses a variant of that to prevent long back-and-forth discussions.

<comment><USER48> You mean, if HN detects a long back-forth, it'll not show your post to anyone for a while after you've submitted it?

That's quite interesting. Is this used anywhere else on the web?

<comment><USER6> The reply link won't appear immediately for deeply nested comments. Initially a minute or two, eventually many minutes. The comments still appear as fast as you allow with your "delay" setting in your profile (2 minutes for me: time to edit, and time to delete the stupid messages that felt good to write but that I shouldn't have written).

<comment><USER18> Sometimes (always?) the reply link doesn't show up in the comment thread, but shows up when you visit the individual comment through its permalink. That's probably a bug though.

<comment><USER6> Always and I think it's deliberate. Those who know can keep it going, but it requires deliberate effort (just enough more than clicking reply) that it might stop some of the back and forth ("Do I really need to put in this much effort for _this_ conversation?").</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment></comment>


It's Official: Water Found on the Moon - <AUTHOR> http://www.space.com/scienceastronomy/090923-moon-water-discovery.html <comment><USER2> I guess now Celine Dion can make whomever she's singing to love her.

On a less silly note, there's so many of these "found water on X" stories that as a lay person, it's hard to tell what's an exciting discovery. I mean, it took a quick Google search to find a "water found on moon!" article dating back to 1998: <http://physicsworld.com/cws/article/news/3299>

What's different between the lunar water ice in the 1998 article and the finding of lunar water ice now?

<comment><USER3> Previously there has been evidence of Hydrogen at certain locations on the Moon, though the evidence did not rule out the possibility that it was bound up in rocks as hydrate minerals. Concrete is perhaps the most widely known hydrate, few would regard concrete as a ready source of H2O even though it may be as much as 1/4 water by weight. Other evidence has pointed to actual water ice but not conclusively. This recent paper puts forward unambiguous evidence that there is actual water ice on the surface of the Moon.

That's significant because water ice is an extremely useful resource in colonization of the Solar System. It can be harvested for potable water, of course, but it can also be cracked into Oxygen and Hydrogen, for breathing and use as a rocket fuel.

That last is extremely important because of the rocket equation. The amount of propellant (fueled mass / empty mass) you need to accelerate a rocket to a specific velocity (delta V) scales exponentially with the ratio of that velocity to the rocket's exhaust velocity. Staging lets you stretch this harsh restriction by throwing away parts of your vehicle so that you can clean the slate and get to a better mass ratio for the next stage. But staging is still exponentially costly, just more efficiently so.

Now, if you look at the very end point of a trip to the Moon and back you have a vehicle launching from the lunar surface and then (the same or another vehicle) transferring to a return trajectory to Earth. These maneuvers take a sizable amount of propellant (especially launching from the surface). The weight of that propellant needs to be gently landed on the surface of the Moon, which costs extra propellant. Further, the return propellant plus its corresponding proportion of the landing propellant needs to be boosted from Earth orbit to the Moon, which costs further propellant. Etc, etc, all the way down to the launch vehicle(s) on Earth. As you see, the return propellant imposes an escalating parasitic cost throughout the whole trip. If, instead of the above, you were able to pilot a mostly empty vehicle to the Moon's surface where it would fuel up with Liquid Oxygen and Liquid Hydrogen manufactured by mining and processing lunar water ice then you would be able to cut out that whole huge chunk of extra weight and propellant needed to get to the Moon and back.

Which means, you could travel to the Moon and back with much lower Earth bound mission mass, which means you can use smaller launch vehicles, which means you can get to the Moon cheaper and easier.

Not to mention, of course, that supplies of water make maintaining a mostly self-sufficient lunar base much, much easier.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> I would think it cheaper to send 32 ounces of water from Earth to the moon in a Dasani bottle, than to dig it out of a ton of rock. Maybe we can make a really long straw and just suck it up from the oceans directly.

</comment><comment><USER5> 32 ounces per ton? Imagine this huge solar-powered factory covering a mile, with a little trickle of water from the 'out' stage.

<comment><USER6> Yeah, but the factory probably isn't doing it just for the water. It's primary purpose will probably be He3 extraction, with water as an incidental-but-very- important sideline. Perhaps other valuable things too.

<comment><USER5> Answered:

[http://feeds.space.com/~r/spaceheadlines/~3/3n9zA4b63i0/0909...](http://feeds.space.com/~r/spaceheadlines/~3/3n9zA4b63i0/090924-moon- oxygen.html)

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER7> Hmm... a volume in shadow, shielded from sunlight, should have low temperatures and be a water trap? Water molecules generated by solar wind or from comets should bounce around until they got there.

I predict that we will soon see designs for trapping (and harvesting) "dew".

This is like Herbert's "Dune", will they find spices, too? :-)

</comment><comment><USER8> Great. Now we can have bottled water from the moon. Of course we will just tap it here, but nobody will know!

<comment><USER9> moonwater.com and moonjuice.com already taken.

</comment></comment><comment> onreact-com I don't get it. Is there really water like we know it from earth or is it just inside some rocks? This article doesn't tell us.

<comment><USER7> The article said there were molecules on the surface. (Either from meteors or hydrogen from the solar wind making hydroxyl (check wikipedia) and/or water with oxygen from rocks.) Quite a lot more than ever expected.

This is good, a moon colony might even be self sufficient in water.

(You have to wonder what other weird, really reactive radicals are on the surface from the solar wind? It will be fun to check for erosion on the equipment left by the moon landings. Any real chemists around? :-) This might be a future problem.)

Edit: The information asked for is in the article, btw. After the heading "Where the water comes from". :-)

Edit: A bit of syntax.

</comment></comment><comment><USER10> > When Apollo astronauts returned from the moon 40 years ago, they brought > back several samples of lunar rocks.

The Apollo Moon landing was fake.

<comment><USER11> Yeah, according to Nostradamus, the Knights Templar and the Free Masons have joined forces with ancient Mayan spirits to put a telekinetic shield around the moon. Now if you spell all the nouns in the previous sentence backwards, add the EBCIDIC values of their consonants, then subtract 666 from the result, you will get the names of all the gays, gypsies and jews who collaborated in Roswell to kill JFK and 2 Pac, man.

<comment><USER12> reddit called ..

<comment><USER11> tell her I ain't here

<http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=aKPW0dIaL2w></comment></comment></comment></comment>


Facebook refuses to follow GDPR regulations by spewing nonsense and lies - <AUTHOR> https://ruben.verborgh.org/facebook/#history <comment><USER2> can someone remind my why people still use facebook?

</comment><comment><USER3> Of course. That sort of thing is entirely on-brand for Facebook.

</comment><comment><USER4> This raises an interesting question. Let's say I have a data-set that contains a lot of photos of people, but I don't know who; or maybe I think I know who, but there's 20% chance there are people who are in these photos that aren't successfully tagged.

Now, lets say someone who I don't have on my list asks for the data I have of them, and I tell them I don't have any, but really they're one of the untagged people. Have I broken the rules? Presumably not.

What if someone requests the info I have on them, I tell them nothing, but then later on I realize that one of these photos actually was a picture of them. Should I then try to follow up with them and make a correction?

I'm curious. I think the GDPR is great. These are important problems.

</comment><comment><USER5> I'm not convinced the hyper-aggressive / snide approch the author is a good idea, if he actually wants access to the data. (Rather than just be showboating to his blog audience, which appears to be the real intent here). Seems like it makes it much easier for Facebook to argue that this is a "manifestly unfounded" request, which is one of the few cases where the GDPR specifically allows refusing a request.

</comment><comment><USER6> GDPR fines may prove an interesting incentive.

<comment><USER7> as long as the Irish data protection authority continues to halt or stall any investigation into FB and co. no GDPR fines will be issued.

I hope the review of the GDPR this year will change the one stop shop principle.</comment></comment>


Rack Hardware Innovation - <AUTHOR> http://www.thureon.com/armarac.htm they just got silver at the 2008 International Design Excellence Awards.  there's more to start-ups that software... <comment><AUTHOR> they just got silver at the 2008 International Design Excellence Awards. [http://www.nzherald.co.nz/section/story.cfm?c_id=5&objec...](http://www.nzherald.co.nz/section/story.cfm?c_id=5&objectid=10522561) there's more to start-ups that software...</comment>


Ask HN: Would quitting my job, to work on a passion project, be a bad idea? - <AUTHOR> I've been at the same company for about six and half years. It's a tiny start up at which software is not our main priority, despite our main offering being a web application that we write ourselves. It's closer to a scam company, because the software itself is merely a sales tool to help bring on new customers. It wasn't always like this. The company was bought, by new owners, three years ago. The new owners re-purposed the company and staff into what it is now.
I'm burned out here and feel as though moving right into a new job would be a bad idea, because I have a feeling that I would carry over some of my depressed attitude, towards coding, into a new job. I do plan to leave, though.
I've had this side project that I've been working on, and day dreaming about, for several months. I'll poke it once a week or so just to keep it moving along. It's currently just a project relating to a hobby of mine and has no plan to make money or anything. It'd be more like cultivating a community around this hobby.
Lately I've been seriously contemplating just putting in my resignation at my current company, and giving this project of mine a solid few months of dedicated work. That time spent would both give me a chance to try to build this thing out, as well as give me some time to decompress from my current job before going into something new. I'm single with enough savings to do this.
Does this seem like a sound plan? <comment><USER2> What other commenters have not mentioned is, are you in a financially safe place to do this? Is your idea big enough to keep you intellectually stimulated as a full-time gig?

I feel strongly that you should leave where you are now. You're not enjoying it, and more important, it sounds like you are not learning or being challenged.

I'm sure there are other interesting jobs in Dallas, but it sounds like you need a bit of time between jobs, which is fine.

I'd give yourself a 6 month plan. You're going to work on your side project for 6 months.

The first thing will be to set out what you can accomplish in 3 months, and prepare yourself that after 3 months, you should start interviewing seriously.

During your first 3 months, you should spend a bit of time networking with the dual goal of promoting your project and keeping in the loop with the tech world so that when the time comes to get back into the work force (if the time comes) you still have connections.

Employers will likely appreciate the time you took, the reasons why and the effort you made with your passion project.

Best of luck.

</comment><comment><USER3> Sounds to me, like you have already made the decision. Take a break, recharge the batteries, and if you can make your passion a reality in the meantime, fantastic. Is your side project something that you could leverage crowdfunding for? You might be surprised at the community that would back something they are passionate about as well. Just a thought.

<comment><USER3> Crowdfunding is no small undertaking itself though.

</comment></comment><comment><USER4> Yes, it is a sound plan. Give them you two weeks tomorrow.

</comment><comment><USER5> you ? (have 12 months worth of expenses && confident in finding a new job fast) : yes : no; :D

</comment><comment><USER6> Sounds good to me</comment>


How to write a Linux device driver - <AUTHOR> http://www.freesoftwaremagazine.com/articles/drivers_linux

<comment><USER2> VFIO!

The I/O MMU!

Write your drivers in userspace, save your sanity. I realize it's hard to get a kernel that supports everything you need to accomplish this, but it's definitely "the future" when it comes to device drivers.

However, this is a decent beginning point for people completely unfamiliar with writing a driver. The table and the makefile parts are especially important for beginners to _just get freaking started_.

<comment><USER3> No, don't write your drivers in user space. Especially for low-latency devices, all the user-kernel-user message passing will be problematic. You can't run at interrupt priority in user space, either.

<comment><USER4> Most devices are USB dongles that flash lights and shift a couple bits, not 100Gbps network cards. It follows that most people's needs will be met by a Python script and libusb, rather than a kernel module.

<comment><USER3> I suppose. I speak from the limited experience of reverse engineering a driver for a PCI device that would freeze the entire system if its interrupts weren't acknowledged immediately.

<comment><USER2> Interrupts are the slowest part of VFIO, but everything else is comparable. The interrupt performance can and will be fixed in the future. Polling is an option for some network uses, but interrupts are obviously technically superior for most workloads.

The I/O MMU can be slightly slower than "true" DMA if done poorly, but the simple use case is actually performs the best (in my teeny experience).

</comment></comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER5> They missed the part where you need documentation on how the chip used in the I/O device actually works. This is the 'tricky' bit way to often.

<comment><USER6> It's not too bad if the device uses USB and you have a working Windows driver for it: run Windows in a virtual machine on Linux, pass the USB device through to it and log the traffic using Linux' USB debug facility. Then figure out what that traffic means. It depends on the device how difficult this is, but for simpler devices it's actually quite straightforward.

For other types of devices or if you don't have ANY driver, it's obviously somewhat trickier, as most I/O protocols are a lot lower level than USB (the host controller driver takes care of most of the heavy lifting for USB). I suspect you'll need specialist debug hardware to log the generated traffic.

<comment><USER7> What do you mean by 'specialist debug hardware'?

<comment><USER6> Basically, one of these:

<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bus_analyzer>

</comment></comment></comment></comment><comment><USER8> This isn't half bad. (From someone who did this for a living at one point)

Btw, if you're writing a USB driver, most of the time the device uses HID, even though that's for a completely different type of device then what HID is supposed to be specced for.

<comment><USER6> _"From someone who did this for a living at one point"_

I'm curious: was this as an independent contractor or for an established company? I really enjoy driver programming and low level stuff for some reason (OSX & Linux and game consoles so far) and would rather like to specialise my contract work on that kind of thing. Beyond people stumbling across my work online, I really don't know who to approach and where to look for that kind of work. It's rather a lot easier to get referrals for more mainstream development work.

<comment><USER8> I did it two places. Both were full time

Cable set top boxes often use Linux, and often need drivers.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER9> Has much changed for 3.0?

<comment><USER10> No.

Keep in mind that the 2.6.x -> 3.0 transition was largely just in the version numbers...in terms of the code there was no major overhaul or change.

ref: <http://lkml.org/lkml/2011/5/29/204/>

<comment><USER11> It was entirely just the version numbers. 3.0.0 is what 2.6.40 would have been; there were no meaningful process changes in that release, and the list of new features was entirely in keeping with all the other recent releases. They simply popped a minor version number off the stack for simplicity.

</comment></comment></comment><comment><USER12> Thanks for the post. I tend to write python to talk to custom USB devices, but this looks like a nice alternative.

<comment><USER13> Can you elaborate? I specifically have a couple USB devices I need to work with and thought I would have to write a device driver for them :)

<comment><USER14> <http://sourceforge.net/apps/trac/pyusb/></comment></comment></comment>