Company: EY
Date: 2009-08-10
Overall rating: 3/5
Employment status: current

You are pressured to advance your career whether you want it or not.
Pros: Good salary, flexible work arrangement available which is great for working moms (but read the cons), programs in place for encouraging advancement for women and minorities, strong culture for measurable goals and career advancement, good benefits (401k matching, medical plans (no vision plan though) pension after 5 years).  In our group, everyone is friendly, if not slightly competitive, but no backstabbers that I've seen in the last 5 years.  Great place for those starting out, have no kids, can work long hours, and you'll be able to get your feet with and have an excellent experience learning accounting, and work toward your cpa license.  Very supportive of providing education credits, and has an annual EY University where they fly you out for a week long training to get your credits.
Cons: Extreme pressure to advance career even if you don't want to, work load is enormous and never lessens and always feel like there is no end, at best you'll be rewarded with more work; always feel like you have to keep up with everyone else where the culture is to work all the time, early in the morning to late at night; at the manager level and above, they highly encourage you (read: pressure you) have to participate and promote national committees whether you want to or not.  All of this is great if you want to because you want to make partner one day because they want you to succeed and generate lots of money for the firm, but all of this is not great if you just want to do a good job but don't want to work a bazillion hours of overtime and want to be able to pick up your kid by 5pm without having to tuck him in at 8pm and join a call at 10:30pm--this is what they mean by flex work arrangement.  I've seen coworkers on "flex work arrangement" work nearly 40 hours every week but only getting paid 60% because they have to "keep up" with their workload because there is no one else to do it and the demands to complete work and remain profitable are great.  Not my idea of flex work arrangement, it's almost like bait and switch.   After doing taxes for 15+ years, and grueling tax seasons year after year, I'm tired of it.  The processes are extremely bureaucratic and what should only take in essence 5-7 hours to do all aspects of a return, takes 20 hours because of all the admin, billing and coordination involved to comply with national processes.  People I work with are great, but the pressures to advance and the stress from nonstop work culture of this place will make any work/life balance difficult.