Company: Deloitte
Date: 2009-05-07
Overall rating: 3/5
Employment status: current

Mostly operations consulting, highly political, still a good firm o start the career.
Pros: - Nice place to start the career (post MBA). Staying at Deloitte for a few years helps you master the politics of consulting and client relationship management.  Deloitte also works in a lot of industries and has a wide list of service offerings (except true strategy, especially growth strategy),  which givens everyone an opportunity to work on projects within their area of interest - you do need to align yourself to the right partner. Work is mostly easy for any bright guy - you may have to pretend that you are working hard by staying at client site till late. Perks are good, vacation time manager onwards is 4.5 weeks / annual - Great.
Cons: There is hardly any true strategy work (Less than 20%), mostly its operations consulting, where any average management professional can get the job done - so what makes the difference between success and failure is politics and knowing the right partners - suck it up. 

Be prepared to spend 70% of your time in making changed to the presentation deck based on personal taste of every partner/ sr. manager/ director involved in the project. The time spend on analysis and developing a solution is hardly 20-30% of the whole time - rest is politics management, validation and meaningless changed to slides. BTW: the firm still does not have a standard presentation format.

The firm is careless in hiring more than needed staff in good times and panicking and firing significant chunks during bad times. People are let go off - without merit analysis - its mainly politics (for above average performers). There is no single culture or intellectual level - IT side of things makes a lot of money for the company. however their mindset is completely different from Strategy & operations consulting people - that creates a lot of conflict.