Company: EY
Date: 2019-05-18
Overall rating: 1/5
Employment status: former
Experience level: Junior

Review for EY GDS TAS consisting of teams- ITTS, FS, TS, OTS, CFS
Pros: There are no pros here
Cons: Always remember EY GDS is the backend support office for EY. Hence, all work comes from EY consultants based out of India. (Sidenote: Don't be fooled by the name of the teams, it keeps on changing, but teams actually remain the same).  All teams have the same work culture and come under the same management (All of GDS TAS is under just 2 partners)
Needless to say the work is basically whatever onshore teams don't want to do themselves i.e. Grunt work (copy paste, formatting etc.)

Typically the managers do not care who you are or what you want to get out of the job. Your learning and career goals do not matter and frankly no one cares- Neither onshore nor offshore teams.

Oh yes.. EY does not have a formatting team i.e. firms or teams to whom powerpoint decks can be sent to make them client ready... so GDS is the de-facto team for such work.

Workwise your past experience does not matter here- One you wouldn't have worked in such a niche area of M&A (then further broken into CFS, IT, working capital etc.) anyway. But even if you are one of the shining stars who learns very fast, there is literally nothing to learn. You are simply a cog in the wheel generating hours on projects, doing whatever you are asked to do.

Office culture is designed to frustrate anyone who wants to learn anything or do something new. All good ideas when presented WILL be shot down. Those that are not shot down initially will be shot down later. Even in the annual "Olympiad" competition (which aims at building new products / solutions for onshore team to use on projects) not one good idea has been implemented till date since the competition started 4 years ago.

The teams run on hours billed on projects- total number of hours in a working day being 9 hours. You are expected to meet a minimum utilization target of 85% else you can bid a good rating goodbye. All people doing grunt work for longer hours are able to achieve much higher. Of course if you give away your personal life and are ready to copy-paste stuff for 10 hours a day you can easily achieve 90% utilization- and that is all that counts here- If you are one of those people, work here and you will prosper.

For anyone willing to do quality work and wanting to lead a healthy fruitful life, you can not compete. For quality work you need time to think, and need  satisfaction and security in personal life (Therefore less utilization- say 65%?). This will not be enough here ever for anyone to get a promotion. 

People have tried to get good work from onshore project teams- few have succeeded, but no one would care unless you have enough utilization. Snd even then the work is either so niche that you can't find any other job in the same area or companies require to hire a person with client facing experience because the issues are so complex.

Because of the above work culture issues brown nosers rule this place. People find a shortcut for everything- People found ways to increase their utilizations by taking hours away from other people- so they pressure others to do most of the work- give them minimum number of hours possible and then charge more for "review". Team managers (Senior managers in these cases look away- because of the brown nosing).

The higher management here believes in keeping the money for themselves. There is no investment on the employees. No worth while trainings and no development of any kind.

Office timings- 8:30 AM to 5:30 PM with flexible working arrangements- Take the flexible working hours at your own peril. The management would clearly state in the appraisal cycle that you take too many work from homes, hence can't be promoted, and your "impression" in the team is not good etc. nevermind the great feedbacks you got on the projects.

Typical feedbacks from managers: - Why did you not shave today, wear only collared T-shirts on casual Fridays - Talk to OTHER teams, be-friend them, make small talk else pushing a case for promotion will be difficult (Your work of course does not count) - Take part in crappy activities (off-sites to Jaipur in 45 degree heat, dance parties etc.) else promotion case is difficult. On top of that office parties are really lame and always low on budget- so forget hard liquor, you will be lucky if you got served beer. Food is also limited in variety and supply.

Root cause of all work culture related problems is that there is never any budget for anything. However, the revenue has been growing at 30% y-o-y since the past 5 years. Margins have been increasing, but there is never any budget for any infrastructure, laptops are usually a decade old, office location is Sect. 21 Dudahera in Gurgaon. They provide cabs but to save cost typically one cab usually covers all of south delhi- Typically 5 people in a Swift- with 1 drop in ggn phase 3, 1 in Chhattarpur, 1 in Sultanpur, 1 in Saket and 1 in Mehrauli.

In Summary:
1) Work sucks
2) Office culture sucks
3) No growth unless you are ok with grunt work or brown nosing

If you are still ok to join- look inwards!!