Company: EY
Date: 2013-02-18
Overall rating: 4/5
Employment status: current

Works You Hard, Should Probably Pay A  Little More
Pros: 1) EY is good about flexibility. As long you have quality work, communicate your whereabouts and personal schedule, and are prepared for all client and management interactions, you can work wherever/whenever  you want. If you want to travel, you can travel all over the world. If you don't want to travel, you can stay local all year long. It doesn't help or hurt you whatever your wants/needs are for your schedule. EY tries to be an open firm and can only achieve that if its people are open about what they need from them.

2) The pay is decent - I'm glad to make what I make; however, a few things: I think they are a little chincy when it comes to pay. There was a group who did not get a market raise in salary when they started two years after they did their internship and they were the only year to not get signing bonuses, which they said they would consider but of course, nothing was considered (see Con #2 below). Staff this year and years going forward are not eligible for performance bonuses, which I think will just make them mad and leave or not care and perform poorly and when there are no staff to do good work....well then, everyone's jobs get a little more crazy.  Raises were usually around 8-13% depending on year-end rating; however a new APB program is changing this (see Con #3 below).

3) EY is an amazing place to start your career. You gain alot of technical experience and managerial skills dealing with their wide variety of engagements and internal advising program. This is evident in their accelerated career progression. If you are home-grown, you can expect to be a staff for 2 years, senior for 3 years, manager for 3-5 years, and then senior manager which is a holding place for partner/principal. If you are brought in as experienced, depending on well you perform, you could have to stay at the same level you were brought in for another year. Usually they will give you two years before telling you that you need to seek new opportunities which is a long time in my opinion (see Con #1 below).  Also, your network grows exponentially the day you start. Of course, it's up to you if you want to nurture those relationships but you are given ample opportunity. You could probably meet someone different every day in a different industry, town, country, client, etc for the first year you work here. EY is also a place of personal branding. They give you the tools to create what you stand for. 

4) Some could view this as a Con, but I felt it was good for me. Some like to say "you are thrown into the fire the day after training". I know I was along with several of my colleagues, in actuality, it was Day 3, not Day 1. Being challenged to the point you almost wet yourself, you learn within your first month of employment about what others would learn in 3 years of working.

5) EY teaches you to effectively and efficiently think on your feet, provides you the tools to succeed and rounds out your set of skills. They use your strengths heavily and build them up even more. You are  an asset and they treat as such.
Cons: I actually really like it here. It's engaging, different, if you don't like someone, usually you only have to work with them for a month of the time, some of my best friends work here. Benefits are good, assistance is good. But my main complaints in order of importance to me are as follows:

1) For the most part, 95% of the people here are competent and are high achievers who take responsibility for when they screw up and are quick to encourage and help you. The other 5% are why people are overworked and end up leaving, and they usually pair their highest performers with these 5% because the audit still needs to get done. Even a year where the high performer has to do 85% of several Fortune 100 audit by themselves and successfully handle 13 other engagements is enough to drive someone mad; I think you literally have steal money before they will let anyone go. And I think they are ok keeping someone who is in that 5% group and losing the good worker, because they know the good worker will probably go to their clients helping them out anyways in the long run.

2) This is a very politically correct firm which is why certain people are not let go and why they are a lot of talk when it comes to addressing problems but are either unwilling or very slow to do anything that would actually change the way stuff is done, and in order to be a "high performer aka 5 rating", you must dedicate 50% of your life outside of work to activities hosted by the firm, picnics, fundraisers, holiday parties, group outings, women's events, recruiting (basically live and breathe the black and yellow) and you must plan and organize them as well and they must be fun and exciting and over the top and creative. Also it is strongly encouraged go golfing with the uppers to move your career along. AND if you are a poor performer (5% mentioned above) but you do all the things I just mentioned, you are probably still going to be labeled as a high performer and they will not fire you.

3) A new APB plan that goes into effect this year gives you the "about the same" raise (all the examples showed a 6-10% raise rather than a 8-13% raise you would have got) with an up to 9 - 18% bonus based on your year-end rating: 3, 4 or 5 and your rank: senior, manager etc. For the first year this is in effect, you obviously make more with this plan. The second year, you make a little less, third year, a little less, because you make less with a smaller compounded base salary.  I thought it was funny that they told this to a room full of accountants and said we would actually make more with this plan. It just takes away from your base and puts into a bonus and then your base salary isn't compounded as much as it would have been in the first place. Anyways, I'm anxious to see what actually happens in the next few years I'm here.