Company: Deloitte
Date: 2016-01-18
Overall rating: 3/5
Employment status: former

Deloitte Digital Seattle: Good and Bad
Pros: • Deloitte overall is a great company. This review is about Deloitte Digital Seattle.

• Great Benefits. Insurance, Devices, Cell Plan discounts, all coming from Deloitte.
• Possibility to travel and accumulate miles. AMEX provided for expenses.
• Good infrastructure, well run company with solid business model.
• Worldwide recognition of belonging to Deloitte. You can work anywhere in the world if you are on a project. Possibilities of relocation.
• Opportunities for months long deployments to Europe, Australia, India, etc.
• Not just a tech company, so there they are not insanely gender imbalanced.
• Good food, modern office.
• Great place to be at for 1 to 2 years if you are junior (below A7), then leave and get another job to get a raise.
• Huge bonuses and perks (30-40 days of PTO, pension) if you are senior level.

Again, Deloitte is a great company to work at.
Cons: This applies to Deloitte Digital in Seattle:

• No career tracks for anybody interested in the mobile space. You need to get into the enterprise space if you want to move up.

• Huge amounts of corporate speak. Never ending emails. Forced trainings on stuff you don't care about. 

• Company doesn't know where its going, it just chases buzzwords.

• Marketing team just makes up ridiculous lines like "WHAT IS DIGITAL?". Read their blog for a good laugh at some of the ridiculous buzzword filled stuff they spew.

• Exploitative of anybody who is not senior (A7 and above in the associate model). You will get paid below market rate

• The entire consulting business model is a pyramid scheme made on charging a client tons of money and paying people newly out of college peanuts.

• No overtime is paid, while the client gets charged hundreds an hour.

• Junior levels will never get a raise even if they ask for it, seniors often get raises.

• Huge turnover. 2 people leaving per week is average. Only senior levels stay because they get paid close to market rate if they negotiated well.

• Backstabbing poisonous review models twice a year that takes up tons of time. People will talk garbage behind your back. BS "goal" oriented reviews in a company with little possibility of advancement. It is all about who likes you or not whether you sink or swim.

• Entire leadership lives in a cloud of their own buzzword BS as seen by their published reports and them blowing half a million on SXSW Shows that say nothing.

• There are people who have done nothing for months at a time because there is no work to do. Pure psychological torture, it can destroy people mentally. There even was a legendary case of a developer who "disappeared", never showed up to work and nobody noticed, kept getting paid for months, and eventually quit, he became an absolute legend.

• The studio is empty half ot the time and nobody knows where people are, even though working from home is frowned upon. It looks like a ghost town.

• Whole place is run by power brokers who have decisions on your careers, better not get on their wrong side. Don't mess with the Senior Engagement Managers, always be on their side.

• Deloitte does not get mobile and never will, eventually the whole scheme will dry up and they will end up doing what they know how to do well, corporate projects like IBM. Nothing wrong with that, it is their DNA.

• The entire office is made up of young people because they are easy to exploit and don't stand up for themselves, and the creative/mobile types have no career ambitions.

• Even the people at leadership positions are unhappy at the thing Deloitte imposes and it is no secret.

To prospective workers there:

Go for it, don't look at the negatives, see for yourself, it might be great, and you may make a ton of money:

Always reject the first offer they make you at the interview, they will make you another one. They have a 50% profit margin on your hourly rate or more. The market is on your side these times.

Always shoot for A7 or above if you are applying for senior or semi senior position. Ask for a level raise to A5 or 6. A4 gets no bonuses. It takes years of masterful plotting to move up, every level matters, you get paid more.

Most employees get very low bonuses, will never get any significant raises and are basically churnable stock with no recognition.