Company: EY
Date: 2013-12-26
Overall rating: 4/5
Employment status: current
Experience level: Confirmed

Great place to build a resume and gain experience to start a career.
Pros: Pros:

• Opportunities to interact with and work for large and respected clients

• Provides the opportunity to work with a diverse group of intelligent and engaging resources 

• Seem to practice what they preach in terms of “people first” culture (at least more so than other organizations)

• Work-life balance exists if and when workload allows it

• Partners and other leaders tend to treat employees with respect and in many cases are very approachable

• Often recognized for good work, although sometimes non-monetarily (new annual cash bonus program has been rolled out but not fully implemented across the firm yet)
Cons: Cons:

• Often staffed on projects outside of my competency or area of interest

• Very bureaucratic and lots of administrative burden due to the high number of existing audit 
clients and related independence concerns; endless checklists, approvals and hoops to jump through (e.g., for client and engagement acceptance)

• For non-tax or accounting consultants, many performance expectations, trainings, red tape, etc. do not apply to my work or clients

• Billing rates for clients are very high (due to partner costs) resulting in the need to sell work with tight budgets and often unrealistic turnarounds to maintain profitability

• Pay-for-performance is weak; heavy reliance on utilization rather than performance reviews (again, the new bonus program has not been fully implemented yet)

• Utilization metric does not consider “project development” or other non-chargeable contributions

• Travel often required at 80%

• Very limited tuition reimbursement program; only pays out for courses directly applicable to 
your position

• Competition and division within different practices internally

• Old technology (just finished upgrading from Win XP; still using Lotus Notes)

• Limited opportunities to provide upward feedback