Company: PwC
Date: 2014-06-03
Overall rating: 3/5
Employment status: former
Experience level: Junior

Great resume booster but job is not stimulating and involves long hours
Pros: Opportunities to learn about client industries, manage different client projects, and understand procedures for maintaining independence between tax consulting and audit work. Company provides awesome perks, including full-scope executive health exam, flexible holidays and vacation time, happy hours with colleagues, and paid associate training.
Cons: Learning on the job during the first few months was very rough and inefficient since my supervisors did not reveal much information about certain duties and expected me to figure them out on my own. Top-heavy management plays favorites with lower-level staff over delegation of chargeable client hours, blames staff for exceeding project budgets when they managed it poorly themselves, are sticklers over perfect quality work done in a short period of time, and impose other arbitrary expectations upon staff. Partner expects staff to work long hours even outside of busy season, "encourages" quality work with negative "reinforcement" and threats, and labels staff coldly as "resources." Management instills fear and unnecessary stress upon staff over exceeding project budgets, forcing some staff members who work slower to "eat" their chargeable client time to avoid consuming too much budget. Such "eating" of time ultimately results in lower utilization rates, destroys incentives to work hard, and lowers chances for promotion in the long term. In-house firm software is notoriously slow and backwards, even amid better state-of-the-art software that is out on the market. No opportunities to attend professional development workshops outside the firm - all development workshops are done hermetically inside the firm.