Company: EY
Date: 2016-02-05
Overall rating: 2/5
Employment status: former
Experience level: Junior

EY- GSS/GTH- UX Group Trivandrum
Pros: If you were to take a generic view, some of the pros of working for EY are (a) Big brand name (b) Opportunities to collaborate with clients from different parts of the world ( c ) Gain exposure on business practices of different service lines ( depends on the project) (d) Market facing opportunities which test your UX design skills (e) Good workplace design and layout (f) if you are an apple fan, you got the all the toys !
Cons: This is specifically related to working in the UX team based in Trivandrum: 
 (a) Location of the workplace sucks big time. The building is located in a forest, someday you will be lucky to find a snake slithering on the road ! I am serious here. 
The UX manager does not want to move to Kochi (far better city) as he wants the team centralized in Trivandrum !! 
(b) Work- People get hired to do "design" only work. Whether those designs actually work, nobody knows as the designs are never tested with users. They have an eye tracker that is apparently collecting dust !! The primary design tool is Axure. If you were to suggest other popular tools that the UX design community uses, it is swiped aside as "Axure is the recommended tool"...unfortunately the UX manager forgets that his group works under the umbrella "Innovation group"..and Innovation happens when you go against the tide !! 
One of the major jobs here is to create "Narratives" for clients when they pitch ideas to other external clients. The world of narratives has moved onto slick video based narration where the story is conveyed in 2-5 minutes. Here again there is the apparent tendency to cling onto powerpoint based narration using MS Powerpoint !! not even Keynote !. The reason given is "huge MB for video files" and "Keynote will not work on Windows"..Willingness to try out different tools or approaches is non existent. 
UX Design - As mentioned earlier..everything needs to be done in Axure and only Axure !! If you are  a visual designer you need to be proficient in photoshop, illustrator etc..The focus of the design is "beautiful design" and not a design that actually works ( you do not know if it works, coz the design is never tested!) 
Usability- Well this practice exists only on paper. Never saw it being implemented on any project when I was there. 
( c ) UX Management people- almost clueless if you were to ask the business value of UX design. 
Team meetings are non existent.- When I was there the last one was held a year back before I left. Very much a directive style of functioning. Have a lot of  tendency to create sales pitches -"promising more than what you can deliver"!! 
The UX management is so poor that they do not know the basic definition of User Experience Design vs. Experience Design !! Do not know the fundamentals of Project Management-  Resource Loading. The fun part here is that EY Trivandrum hires a lot of project managers!!
 Certain individuals in the group will be tasked heavily and certain individuals will not be. Most of the time you will find somebody or the other sitting idle! and if you are sitting idle you will be asked to work on non productive work that more or less will not be counted against your performance for the year !
Performance ratings- If the UX manager likes you, you get good ratings or else be happy with a 3! year end rating has No correlation to the number of projects or effort you put in. Though I must say project effort is recognized. EY uses the bell curve ratings system- in other words there is a certain min. of individuals who would get a 5 or 4 or 3 from the group! 
Office Politics- As rosy as it can get. 
So if you want to really join this UX group and cannot decide, ask this question to yourself "Would you like to goto a forest?"