Company: EY
Date: 2018-08-01
Overall rating: 3/5
Employment status: current
Experience level: Junior

Great company if you're not a designer.
Pros: EY has really good benefits, you can work from home, good work/life balance, some really nice people and compensation is competitive.  If you don't care about working on inspirational design work and want a good paycheck then this is the place for you.
Cons: - As a designer I can say that this is not a great design culture. A lot of the technology you will use is dated (they just got Macs for designers in Summer 2017 and Sketch) which means to complete a lot of tasks you have to use a Windows VM to do things like log your timecard, access the EY intranet etc.
Speaking of, there are frequent issues with your email, Skype (or Lync from 2011 which is what you use on Macs) so anticipate spending a part of your day on the phone with IT consistently. This is not an exaggeration, outages happen about once every month to month and a half. 

TOO MANY MEETINGS. I can't say that enough. There's some days where I've been on meetings 6-8 hours. This is unacceptable for a designer that is supposed to be producing. A lot of the times meetings just drag on and they're not very focused. This isn't something that is going to change at EY as it's a part of their culture.

- The design work is boring. If you're a creative designer, working in tax is a snooze-fest. There's only so many ways you can slice forms, text fields and tables. If you're looking to work on cutting edge design then this probably isn't the place. 

- Rules and regulations that have nothing to do with design. You have to do frequent testing on topics about finance and tax. If you are a client-serving team even if you aren't working with a client directly and you're not in any form of tax or auditing role you will be forced to sell stocks, bonds, etc. if they are clients EY serves. Same goes for your spouse.  This seems unnecessary for a role that will never touch financial data. 

- A lot of the EY engineering teams you work with to put it simply are not good. I've ran in to situations where things that have been standards as far as a responsive design or some sort of animation could not be done because the developer couldn't do it. We're talking interactions that have been done for 5-6 years. This makes your job as a designer difficult because you're crippled by developers that are up to today's standards. They need to hire more developers that aren't all off-shore too.