Company: Deloitte
Date: 2009-03-16
Overall rating: 3/5
Employment status: former

Good place for new grads to cut their professional teeth.
Pros: Great people, friendly place.   If you are a new grad it's a great place to build a resume and get some good work experience.     If you are an "experienced professional"  it may be a disappointment.
Cons: Deloitte has no process for streaming the careers of experienced professionals who are new to consulting.   As an accounting firm, they largely operate on the apprentice model and so you are thrown in with the heap of new hires.    Even if you have 20+ years of professional experience at a senior managment level, you'll be treated the same as a 22 year old new graduate fresh from an MBA program.
The work is the same and  you might find your skills aren't fully utilized as you'll end up doing a lot of grunt work that in industry would be done by an experienced executive assistant  - but these supports are only available to partners, not consultants so you can expect to spend hours on end doing secretarial work (even though the pay isn't very good, you are still paid too much to collate documents  - not good business sense in my opinion.) 


Also there is a lot of lip service to work life balance, but the performance metrics are all on billable hours.  It's how much you do (or bill in this case) that drives your evaluation, rather than the quality of the work.  If anyone tries to tell you that anything more than billable hours are considered in measuring your value to the firm, don't believe them for one minute!

 If travel is involved, that time isn't billable and even though you are asked to document it, not one hour is considered in assessing your performance.    I billed above normal hours, but ended up spending almost 25 hours in travelling time per week for which I didn't get credit and was done on my own time.     You can't really take  time back in lieu because then your billable hours will be compromised. 

Also during the time I was there, there were issues with leadership (partners).   They are highly competitive with each other and many times you feel like a commodity.    Also since the track to partner is generally on billable hours, many who reach this level are there simply because they are good at sales versus people management.    

There was high turnover during the time I was there but management just normalized it rather than asking why.