Company: PwC
Date: 2019-12-01
Overall rating: 2/5
Employment status: former
Experience level: Confirmed

Your experience depends more on your practice than the firm
Pros: As I said in my headline, a lot of your experience mostly depends on what practice you're in and not the firm, itself.  One person in one practice could be miserable while someone in another practice could be happy.  Some of my pros and cons are practice-specific, so keep an eye on those.
I was in the Advisory line of service doing business applications, but I don't want to go any more specific than that because I still know people there.

- PwC had the best onboarding program I've ever been through.  (Unfortunately, they killed it.  Whatever they have in place now is not nearly as good as mine.)
- If you do well, you will advance quickly through the ranks.  When I was there, business was good and so were the bonuses.
- When you move to the next level, you quickly assume those responsibilities.  Nobody looks at you as your last level, anymore.
- When I first started out, you could get training approved for just about anything, so long as there was a good business case.  (This also went away in later years.)
- I met a lot of smart, good people who ended up becoming my friends.
- The company helpdesk is good.  It was outsourced to India, but I still think it's pretty good.  I love that most things are accessible via one toll-free number.  (In other firms I've worked at, it's been one phone number for one thing and another number for another thing.)
Cons: - Like any auditing firm, independence is big.  If you own a lot of securities, you might be required to sell some of them if they are audit clients.  Independence compliance gets harder if you're a Manager or above.
- I didn't have much work-life balance.  I could finish work at 11:00 pm then have to take a phone call with someone in Asia at 7:00 am the next day.  That happened a lot.
- Managers and directors rarely changed scope, even when it called for it.  This led to the work-life balance I talked about, above.  I've been told to hide extra hours worked by managers, directors, and even one time, by a partner.
- The architects in my practice were so busy selling that they didn't have time for delivery or for mentoring younger consultants.   I rarely felt supported in what I was doing.
- PwC is an up -or-out organization.  If you're not ready to be promoted, you're standing in the way of someone else being promoted to your level.  In my opinion, some people get promoted before they're ready.
- You can't find anything on the Intranet.  Search shows hits from other member firms before the US firm.  Or information that's five years old and not relevant anymore.  The best way to figure out how to do something is to ask someone else.
- The firm has tools that are either hard to use or nobody uses them.  Managers and directors use their home-grown spreadsheets to manage project financials.  Some directors require things to be one way, reporting-wise, and other directors require them to be another way.  So the spreadsheet you use to track hours, financials, etc. in one project is useless in the next.  All this from a firm that offers change management and adoption advisory services.
- Doing taxes is a nightmare.  You get a W-2 from every state you work in.  I even got a W-2 from California after working there for one day.  I've worked for other firms where this happened, but at least they give you free H&R Block.  Here, I got a discounted TurboTax with free states.
- Speaking of taxes, one year, I lived in New Jersey and worked in New York, where your wages in both states are reported 100% on your W-2.  Despite tax being PwC's bread and butter, there was no tool available for pulling the actual wage you made so you can adjust accordingly.
-  Before I left, they switched from a home-grown tool to Concur for expenses.  Concur was much better at enforcing business rules (I'm sure that's why they used it) but the way they set it up was so much worse.  Expenses took three times longer when they switched, sometimes requiring phone calls to the helpdesk to resolve the mysterious error I got.
- Things have restructured so many times that I couldn't tell you who my practice lead was or who the people I was working with in HR.
- This is something a director once told me:  "Don't give him a good rating.  That won't incentivize him to work harder next time."  (Yes, I was really told that.)
- Another thing a director once told me:  "Don't ever say no to this client."  No sane director or manager would ever ask their reports to do that.
- One time, I was so stressed out that I threw up in front of a client.  The director's reaction:  (1) "Are you okay?"  Then, (2) "Don't throw up in front of the client.  You have to show better leadership than that."
- One time, a director insisted we bring on an unqualified developer from another country to our project team when we had a qualified one in our practice because he was from that country.  We had to train the developer from the ground up because she had never worked on the platform before.  (The other developer was an expert on our platform.)  There was no time in the project to train her.  The project estimate assumed that the developer could hit the ground running on day 1.  That director is now a partner.
- A director I know worked on an accelerator for two years that turned out to be vaporware.