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I recently joined TCS but I was moved into very different project which was told during hiring. Also they told me for joining incentive but later after 65 days of joining they didn't give saying your business aproval got rejected. I really want to be with TCS but due to project dissatisfaction, I am looking for different job. I am not sure if I can leave the organisation soo soon(4 months) and it should not effect my carrier.
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Hey Fishes Looking out for a job change and came across vacancies at Deloitte India as per my profile and experience. Can someone kindly help me with the referral. That'll be great help. Have been trying from a long time to switch but nothing fruitful yet. Your referral might make the job hunt a bit easier so kindly help. Yoe: 3.3 Profile: SAP SD associate consultant Immediate joiner
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The message is not to eat your time but just be mindful of your time. Usually for those client, I always assess how much time it may take and let Partner know if I think it will take more time. I don’t do any research and all before I know if I can charge them.
Thank your for the insight
The message is to be faster, smarter, stealthier, and magical (which equals eating your time). Billable hours are a big part of how we are measured so if a partner thinks you aren’t being “mindful” of them then maybe all that high oxygen air he’s breathing in at the top tax bracket is making him loopy. These types of comments are precisely why people eat their time. Everyone understands that and no one wants to own it. “Bill all your time so that I can bill the client but don’t bill so much that I have to write any off or explain anything to anyone. Find the elusive price point between need based value and pain and bill that.”
Yes, he (or they) is saying eat your time. It’s a double edged sword, the poison that is the cure. Anyone who says anything else is deluding themselves.
I’m gonna end my rant here so that I can go bill because it’s busy season and those extra hours I’ve worked aren’t gonna eat themselves.
Rising Star
I remember before my first promotion I was in a meeting with my boss confessing how I ate so many of my hours on a big client…
Boss promoted me in the meeting and said “congratulations, time to move you along on the path towards upper management” 😂
The message is “don’t eat your hours” but “eat your hours”
My favorite is them getting mad on fixed fee engagements. This is the fee you told us to charge, our team is good, so it takes what it takes. Idk what you want us to do. Write offs are internal anyway. I get paid the same regardless so it’s not really like we’re “losing” money because that would only be true if the engagement i otherwise would be working on isn’t fixed fee and those lost hours are getting billed, AND it’s not like we’re selling a good for 10 bucks and it cost 11. Idk how to explain it but write offs aren’t really “losing money” in the sense of the store down the street losing money.
There is nothing wrong with charging all hours you worked. But the budget is already set up, so it is important to know how many hours are allocated to you. It is ok to exceed the budgeted hour, but if it is expected, let your partner know as soon as possible that you will exceed the budgeted hour for x, y, z reason. Then, the partner can communicate it to the client earlier. Client doesn't want to be surprised by any unexpected additions fee.
The partner can also write off hours. It’s not like the client gets your time sheet directly. By knowing how much “over budget” the project is, the partner can better manage estimates for future work.
Also document what you are doing and consider maybe that your are taking too much time to do tasks. But it’s a competitive marketplace and the partner may how lowballed to win the project.
Billing clients is like driving a taxi. If I’m driving a taxi 10 miles, I’m not going to charge for 8 miles.
What firm is that?
Partner needs to calm TF down. The budget is the budget, the fees are the fees. An hour charged does not necessarily need to convert to an hour billed.
100% I also only heard it through the grapevine but still very aggravating to be working day and night and hear that a partners upset with you for them underselling a job
Chief
That’s really impressive. That’s the right way to do it. I just don’t know how many people actually follow it. People on here say they never eat any hours but from personal experience I think it’s a very different experience for most. IMO I think office and team culture, firms always trying to undercut other PA’s proposed prices, and the tone at the top are the problem.
In my 6+ years, almost every senior/manager/SM I know eats hours to varying degrees. Due to the insane amounts of shortages the last two years, so much time is spent having to train all the new team members (straight out of college, experienced hires, GDS) compared to pre-covid. We end up going over budget every year, but on some engagements if we really charged the hours we worked, our hours would probably be 1.5-2x over budget across the board. Even when we go over a little over, there are uncomfortable conversations starting with the partner talking to the senior manager, SM talking to manager, etc. In my first few years here, there were people above me who specifically said to eat hours, but in the last three years or so, ever since the whole “charge all your hours” emails, teams will say things like: charge all your time but be cognizant of your hours, in the past it’s only taken the team xx hours to finish this, etc. While they don’t explicitly say to eat hours anymore, they’re still implying the same thing, have talks with us regarding our hours charged, and when we charge more, it reflects poorly on our reviews. If only people had charged their hours honestly to begin with. Even when we tell higher ups that the budget is too small, they say try to make it work and we will see where we end up, but then we end up going over budget, they get upset at the end of engagement. They should have just sold the work for more or expected lower margins. It’s a vicious cycle lol
Sometimes I think about going back to PA from my industry job and then I read a post like this and am reminded of what drove me out. You described the culture so precisely.
Deciding how much time to bill each client is a giant game. You pretty much have to overcharge the ones that don’t care / are on fixed fees, and undercharge the ones that do care / are actually getting charged by the hour.
In the same way that there are “book to tax” differences, there are “actual time to timesheet time ” differences.
You should keep track of your actual time and then make the proper adjustments to get to your “timesheet” time. You will need to make the proper adjusting entries to add, subtract, and reclassify your time between clients so that the firm approves of it.
So when your Partner or Senior Manager tells you that something is supposed to take 5-7 hours to do and you charge the 15 hours it actually takes what do you think is going to happen?
Do you think your Partner will be proud that you worked so hard and suggest going to the client and asking for more money?
Or do you think you will just get a warning and a mediocre project review if it keeps happening?
The actual solution is to bill 10 hours to the client, shift 2.5 hours to other clients, and eat 2.5 hours worth of time.
I get really annoyed when I hear of staff eating time on any project. So many negative consequences of that… your utilization is understated, your personal revenue targets end up understated, I can’t make informed hiring decisions since I don’t know what my real capacity is on the team, my pricing decisions are being made from understated data.
Please don’t let anyone influence you to not post ALL of your hours.
Plus the next ROM estimate uses this poorly tracked engagement as the basis for pricing, and we roll the bad information forward into the next engagement. If we’re the best in the business, we shouldn’t be working for free.
Ugh I feel sorry for everyone in big 4. 1800 hr quota here and no one cares if you blow the budget
YES!!! You have 200hrs to complete 400hrs of work. Just make sure you don't eat hrs because we want to be fair but don't charge that many hrs because the client doesn't like it.
You’re judged by your billables. It’d be insane not to bill for every single minute you work. Never, ever sacrifice yourself so a partner’s engagement looks more profitable
Add value. If your time is being questioned then you may not be adding enough value to the engagement. Try to be more purposeful with the time you charge and put some thought into the timesheet descriptions
Ya that’s fair too. As a manager when staff aren’t available , my billing rate is significantly higher and if I end up doing the prep , and some research , and for most jobs the prep just takes what it takes , if it’s not complex a staff and a manager take the same time. So an additional $100-150 an hour adds up. But also ridiculous turnarounds cause exhausted employees who in turn are less efficient causing a higher bill
I had a client who specifically told us they would rather have their staff handle tasks that we would normally just send to the GDC such as formatting data. When they provided sample support they also provided a spreadsheet that basically was our testwork template already completed.