Company: Deloitte
Date: 2017-08-01
Overall rating: 1/5
Employment status: former
Experience level: Junior

Don't do it! Stories from two years as an S&O analyst
Pros: -business analyst and consultant community is fantastic
-some projects reasonable
-some managers were awesome (unfortunately, few and far between though)
Cons: A few quotes that sum up my experience:
-"By nature of the profession we all chose to be in, we must be responsive to our clients 24 hours a day."  -Senior Manager
-"Not a lot of fulfillment in this job - making rich white men more rich. But you can make a lot of money."  -Principal
-“You can take a break for dinner.” -Managing Director

Toxic culture and values:
-Self-serving, everyone for themselves mentality
-It's all about sales and what you can do to sell the next project. It didn't seem like leaders on my teams really cared about long term value for clients
-On multiple projects, I had managers who spoke negatively of clients, talking about them being stupid or making fun of them in some way
-I had managers (on multiple projects) that misrepresented information to clients / mislead clients into believing things that weren't true

Projects:
-Projects are mundane and boring
-Stereotypical of why people hate consultants. For example, doing work that is supposed to be an “independent point of view” but not actually doing any analysis then just taking exactly what the project sponsor wants and pitching it to other functions as “an independent point of view” or teeing up the sale of a multi-million dollar technology implementation that the client may or may not even need (hard to tell, considering we didn't do any real analysis)
-Very little can be trusted in a proposal. What you’re seeing is a deck of recycled slides that have been reformatted, a bunch of logos of “big name clients” (that this project team hasn’t personally served) and a bunch of senior Deloitte people with expertise in the area (that won’t actually contribute to the project beyond the sale)

Work (for a BA in S&O):
-Expectation is more about hours spent in front of a laptop rather than getting actual work done. From my experience, it seemed like many people were doing 4-5 hours of real work a day while being forced to sit in front of their laptop for an additional 10-12 hours
-No ownership of work; no autonomy
-Difficult to get feedback from managers. In my experience they never made time or constantly rescheduled (until the project was done)
-Almost entirely project management and slide making
-Being a task rabbit (getting lunch for your manager, printing documents, etc.). On one project, the manager had me get him his lunch every day for the entire project
-Managers will not let you bill your actual hours (even if it’s a fixed fee project!). This means you’ll be logging 45 hours in the system while working 60-70 hours a week. And note that the hours logged do NOT affect the billing to the client on a fixed fee project. This is literally a partner taking advantage of the people they call “staff” or “resources” to maintain profitability on their projects. And it’s a sorry excuse to understaff projects then overwork the team