Company: PwC
Date: 2014-11-19
Overall rating: 2/5
Employment status: current
Experience level: Senior

Enter at your own risk
Pros: Work can be interesting, if you manage to grab interesting projects and clients. 

As long as everything is great, everything is great.

It is a good starting position to better jobs; just don’t hang around too long. When you reach manager position or after five years (whatever comes first) leave or risk being stranded for a long time (industry does not like to hire overqualified advisers for in-house roles; even if you wish to reach a partner position, it is always easier to do this from outside by coming from industry then waiting for in-house promotions). 

Salary is a better as in industry and in other countries for the same position; but beware of a trap: together with promised promotions and occasional pay raises they will try to keep you in place so long that you become overqualified and no longer interesting for the industry. Then you become stuck in your position.

If you are an actor, you will do great: threaten every year that you will leave the firm and you will be guaranteed a promotion, pay rise and bonus. Then act as advised above.
Cons: Politics - it is a boy's club (even if some boys are girls) and there are no real role models. If you don’t get the right boss to support your promotion you will not happen no matter how great your annual performance review looks like. Typical excuse is: “You’ve done great, it has been a tough year for the firm, maybe next year.” If you get right support you get promoted regardless of actual results. Typical official explanation to the team: “She/he has such a potential, we simply cannot afford to lose her/him.”

Competition for clients and assignments between staff (also within your own team) is completely normal. Even worse is that this tactic is officially condemned and in practice encouraged by the leadership. Get ready to spend your vacation time checking your emails on hourly intervals just to make sure that your colleagues don’t steal your prime client whom you have been targeting with a new project for the last six months. Even if you are just on a business travel (or on lunch break) and a client calls your office phone, expect your peer to try to snitch the client of you.

PwC requires long hours, but offer flexibility; this would be great IF the company wouldn't encourage “dog-eat-dog” culture. To summarize: you do have possibility to take days off, but you will be penalized for this. A lot of people have overtimes and unused vacation, because they are afraid not to be in the office. Unused vacation and overtime is written off at the end of the financial year – which is (conveniently) end of June.

There is no long-term strategy; by the time people climb to the senior partner role they are old enough to look towards their retirement; all they are interested in is to take in money as soon as possible, before they are forced to quit the firm.

Bosses are too busy to care (or they just don’t care). They follow the path of the least resistance:  whoever comes first with a story about a coworker will be heard, no facts checked; you will then have to defend yourself and if successful you will be told to solve the issue with the accuser and not molester the boss again. 

Lack of professionalism and competence among HR - no matter what you wish to discuss or ask for a (job related) help, you are there on your own – what you will receive is a worn out phrase: “We can't help you here, but if you need anything, just let us know.” Despite what HR say, if you come to them with a problem, you are the problem.

About 40% of staff are foreigners. PwC hires them, because they cannot find competent people within Switzerland. However, PwC does not recognize that these foreign employees are expats. You will be paid less than your Swiss equivalents. You might get a relocation package, if you are persistent enough. Afterwards, forget any kind of expat package or basic support like help with immigration or other authorities, help with income tax filing…