Company: PwC
Date: 2011-11-15
Overall rating: 4/5
Employment status: current

Good firm, decent salary, long hours, no work-life balance, no benefits, and difficult to scale
Pros: PwC has a great brand name and good recognition in corporate America. This goes a long way in any client engagement. As a large firm, PwC also has a lot of resources at its disposal which is useful. You work with reasonably intelligent and hard working people, which always makes it easier.

PwC also has some senior leadership who are active in the day-to-day activities of engagements, which is good when they make firm-wide decisions that impact us.
Cons: Unlike most consulting firms, PwC does not have an up-or-out structure, which results in a lot of incompetent people who are perfectly happy to stay where they are at. This also means that there is no clear cut path to making Partner should you choose, and a lot more chaff than wheat.

Furthermore, while PwC pays well, their benefits (especially health and retirement plans) are pretty dismal. It is so poor that I am on my wife's healthcare plan as her spouse, which offers me more than PwC's own plan.

As a large firm with audit and tax divisions, PwC also comes with a lot of regulatory and other overhead, which impacts the amount of time you can spend on your actual engagements. Unlike the consulting divisions of other, similar companies (e.g. Deloitte), PwC's consulting analytics are all run by the engagement teams (e.g. expense reports, engagement margins etc). So, this adds additional overhead to already overworked teams.