Company: EY
Date: 2015-07-28
Overall rating: 3/5
Employment status: current
Experience level: Junior

Great, if you like being an accountant.
Pros: If you really want to be an auditor or tax accountant or accounting consultant, career and salary progression is very clear. Being made a partner, however, will depend on lots of factors outside of your control.  

Great starting place for a job as an accountant or controller or even CFO at another company.

This is a premier company from a global perspective. No question one of the strongest companies in the industry, though that doesn't necessarily translate to being a fun company to work at. 

They pay for your CPA degree and even provide a bonus for passing it early.  

If being an accountant is your dream, you can't go wrong with EY.
Cons: If you do not want to be an auditor or tax accountant or accounting consultant, stay away. Don't even visit their webpage. 

This company is about doing an adequate amount of work in as many hours as possible in order to bill the client roughly what was billed in the past and work toward billing more in the future.  Creativity is stifled. I was told, very specifically by a manager, that auditors are not there to "help" the client, but merely to verify that they are doing what they say they are doing.  It is a babysitter's job.

Very simple tasks (like comparing numbers in multiple documents) are made extremely convoluted and time consuming.  Everything has to be done in a particular order because the whole process is regulated, and that is understood, but time-saving measures are not encouraged.  

Face time is very important. The intern doesn't leave before the associate, who stays until the senior associate is gone, who won't move without knowing the manager is gone, who doesn't budge until the senior manager is gone. The senior manager lives in fear of the partner, and so he works all night.

In all honesty, it is important work, and certain people are cut out for it, but if you like your creativity, and if you don't like the thought of working 80 hours to do a 40 hour job don't work at a Big 4 firm like EY.  

If you value money early in your career and are smart enough to get this job out of college, don't get this job out of college. Pay is insulting after the wining and dining they do during on-campus recruiting. Benefits are stingy.