Company: Deloitte
Date: 2010-05-30
Overall rating: 2/5
Employment status: former

Engagement Hours Consistently Missestimated.  Hours often not reported in order to appear closer to budgeted hours.
Pros: The only good thing about working for Deloitte is the skills you can gain including learning how not to treat your staff or run an engagement.  You will also learn to deal with all types of people. although many of those dealings won't go well - internally especially.    

The pay and benefits are good, but the best thing is mainly the name brand and recognition you can get from having worked at Deloitte when you go to industry or are applying elsewhere.  It basically says you are a competent person.
Cons: There is a reason the turnover rate is so high (15% per year or 75% over 5 years, the turnover is also composed mostly of staff with the tail portion being exprienced/long term employees).  If we look at the work - which is long hours and 97% of how you spend your time at Deloitte - it is very bland.  Its boring and often you are in a room with no windows until after dark spending time fixing other people's mistakes and helping them prepare adjustments.  Managers are too stressed, overworked, and underslept to be overly friendly.  At time I had managers who simply couldn't crack a smile and I couldn't blame them.  

As the staff of the engagement your job is to document things that have happened and how lower level accounting staff complete or have compelted there jobs.  You don't create anything except for a guide to the past that confirms whether something has or hasn't happened (change in assets - balance sheet, earnings - incomes statement, cash flow etc.  Technically speaking its not challenging but you do learn to manage large workloads.

Specific to my office there was also a culture of conservative performance reviews and no focus on employees abilities or what they did well.  The performance reviews basically consisted of areas where a employees should improve.  They consistently missed the half of the story about what an employee does well and where they made a unique contribution (also know is as added value to the engagement).  Many of the suggestions made by my managers were legitamate, but at the same time they simply highlighted my obvious weaknesses.  They were nothing more than an observation and they certainly weren't constructive.

Unfortunely many points in the reviews were also petty and personal and sometimes completely innacurate.  I found some things to be simply irrelevant.  One such example was I was by  a senior that while my work was good I wasn't a team player.  The reason was because staff often ate lunch at their desk and I usually went out (often quickly for just 30-45 minutes, never more than an hour).  Being a single male out of college I was simply the type that ate out and rarely prepared my own meals.  Thats just one example.    

Less than 5% of staff received greater than average scores - obviously the real variance in performance is far greater than what is accounted for in your reviews.  It makes for a relatively pessimistic and overworked culture.  On numerous occasions, with different seniors, my senior told me that the manager asked them to rewrite the review to make it sound more average.  This was basically the number one reason I felt I had to leave.  Based on the high turnover rate at my level I feel that many people came to the same conclusion (about leaving within 2 years) for one reason or another that was ultimately related to a flaw in how managers managed there time and lives. 

I know this sounds like a big complaint.  Please keep in mind that my description of performance reviews, in my experience, was consistent  for reviews on engagements where I performed both my best and worst.

My one suggestion, if you do work there, is to ask that you clearly ask managers and seniors to add some notes about your strengths to your reviews before they are finalized.  There is the opportunity to do this as you sit with your mentors to go over your reviews - they act as an intermediary until the review is finalized and submitted to HR and management. If you make a strong case there will be some changes is the positive direction.  It also helps that your mentor probably knows your strengths and can support you.