Company: PwC
Date: 2017-03-16
Overall rating: 1/5
Employment status: former
Experience level: Junior

Moving forward with Sympathy only
Pros: Looks good on your resume
Network opportunities
International environment
Cons: Turning down other offers, I believed in the spirit of the Big 4. Starting straight from university, I was motivated to start at a world known and well-respected company. 

In the intro month, they were swearing on an environment full of team orientation and coaching. Quickly, I realized that people weren't putting effort to help you out, instead you were rather being thrown into cold water.  
Instead, they were pressuring for perfection from you after explaining to you things once (being with the company about 6 weeks at that time). If you dare to ask second questions for further understandings, that would be discussed on your feedback as negative review (such as "he isn't capable of understanding"). 

During my work I experienced seniors acting as managers, writing reviews which I couldn't do any more besides shaking my head about, such as "he/ she didn't mark something in yellow". Other seniors copying and pasting the same reviews into multiple feedbacks multiple times, regardless whether your knowledge and working hours for the company you were auditing was 50, 150 or 250 hours. Trying to  explain this to your reviewer (a manager), who is suppose to help you out and the only thing he says is “They are allowed to write whatever they want”, meanwhile me trying to explain that the knowledge and quality of someone’s work isn’t the same and rather improves, enhances and quickens if someone spends 50 hours on the project, or when someone has worked 150 hours, and again if someone has worked for 250 hours in the same project.

I experienced higher level employees acting as seniors, trying to pressure you, asking for things that really don't make sense at all, and ask you again to fix them the way you were thinking before, and at the end of engagement putting on your feedbacks that you are taking too much time to do your work. 

The CEO had inserted overtime to be approved by manager in 2016: With that in mind, I had directors and managers coming to me at 16:00 asking me for things that needed to be finished for the next day call with client at 9am, which leads to working some 3-5 hours over time. None of these hours were allowed to be charged. 
Other managers were only giving the time they had to be charged as overtime to certain seniors/friends only. 

At the very end, it comes down to sympathy and empathy towards to who you are working with. If you are lucky and you happen to work with someone you get along with, then you are sorted. Otherwise, it’s a lot of biting your teeth together and pray that the engagement is over sooner rather than later and you don’t have to work with this person again anymore. I experienced PwC as an injustice rather employer, where I saw people freaking out, crying, losing it (list can go on) in front you, witnessing discrimination towards your background and strictly showing within the team who their favorite is and who is somewhat worthless towards them. Would I ever do it again? Definitely no.