Company: PwC
Date: 2008-12-23
Overall rating: 3/5
Employment status: current

Good place to work if you're looking for accelerated experience, personal growth, career opportunities, and stress.
Pros: PwC is a great place to start right out of school if you want to accelerate your career for the first few years.  Additionally, Big 4 experience seems to open a significant number of doors once you decide to move on to "greener pastures".

PwC hires excellent people.  I've had very few co-workers I disliked or who were unqualified - particularly those who were hired by the firm right out of school and have progressed through the ranks.

I've worked at some great clients and built an awesome network both within and outside of the firm.

Most of my friends from school who decided to forgo the Big 4 route seemed to start with significantly higher salaries.  It only took me a couple of years to catch up or surpass their salary levels.

There are a lot of great opportunities within the firm to work on different types of projects in some really interesting locations - this is especially true within Advisory.
Cons: It's difficult to stand out, particularly when the firm really wants you to fit within a specific type of role and list of capabilities.  While the firm does a great job of preaching diversity, when you're actually on the job it's been my experience that managers/partners fail to recognizing an individual's skills and talents and utilize them in the best way possible.  Everyone's a "resource" just like everyone else.

There seems to be a big disconnect between the quality of person that the firm will hire externally into a senior or manager position versus promoting someone internally.  On several occasions I've seen people get skipped over for promotion and instead the firm hired someone externally who was not nearly as capable.

The importance of building good relationships can't be overstated.  "It's not what you know, it's who you know" definitely applies at PwC.  A lot of positive things are said internally about the firm's annual review process but there's a significant flaw - partners are essentially able to override the outcome of any annual review.  You have to be careful who you rub the wrong way because if this person has the ear of an influential partner one negative comment can drop your rating significantly and kill any chances for promotion - no matter how much your official file supports the opposite actions.  This is unfortunate because the periodic feedback and annual reviews can end up being exercises in "cya" rather than good growth opportunities.

I've heard many of my peers complain that the partners tend to be disconnected from the staff.  I've found that this varies significantly by individual partner and specific engagement.  As a broad statement though, I would tend to agree.

Stress levels are typically very high - especially in the Assurance practice.  I couple of years back I went to a doctor for my biennial, firm-provided health checkup.  The doctor told me that he sees several PwC employees each month and that he's found that without fail these people always have significantly higher stress indicators (e.g., blood pressure, insomnia, etc.) than his average patient.  Unfortunately, I wasn't surprised.  Since moving to Advisory my stress levels have improved somewhat.