Company: Deloitte
Date: 2019-01-09
Overall rating: 1/5
Employment status: former
Experience level: Junior

Poor management and little stimulation
Pros: - The name on your CV
- Some good people at the company
Cons: I don't usually like to trash a company like this but working at Deloitte in France has been one of the worst professional experiences I have had from the start. I didn't come from consulting, which I was told in interviews was an asset. There was no real onboarding when I joined so I had no guidance on what I should be doing, and how. The only thing I was told was to read proposals to get familiar with the work. I also joined in the summer, which isn't the busiest period in France anyways. I spent a two weeks reading that proposals before I started going around and harassing managers to get something to do. That went on for 2 months before I was allowed to support on a small project - I billed one day a week. 

After that point, I spent more months benched and waiting for something. I consistently harassed managers and was given only menial tasks, most often translations. After 4 months I was put on a project for 2 days a week, and I was thankful for even having something to do. 
But this project was completely irrelevant to my background and experiences and I had no manager to guide me. It would later end up costing me because I wasn’t able to perform to the same level as someone who knew what he was doing. My project evaluations did say I delivered above expectations. After that I remained benched for multiple months again until I had enough and started harassing my personal network to find a new client project. I eventually won a project from a key priority client. This would end up going unrecognized by upper management, instead the focus was on my staffing rate. 

I was eventually told that there had been a "casting error" in my hiring and that the practice wasn't able to integrate profiles as different and diverse as mine; after one and a half years. This was the explanation for why I hadn’t been staffed. In coffee break chats I found out I had been benched so that I would leave the company on my own. 

Management in my practice was inexperienced and unable to provide any vision or sense of direction. Exemplary of the constant disarray: a new partner was hired and left after 6 months. Internally he was badmouthed to the team but it came out he had been promised that he would be the head of the practice - when he didn’t get this, he left. 

“Frenchness” is very present throughout the company. To fit in and succeed you need to bend to that strong culture of corporate politics. There is barely any will to take a risk and invest in the future, instead the focus is on what works now - everything else is ignored. 

Not everything at this company is bad though. Some of the people I met were smart thinkers and fun to be around. Certain practices have a good team spirit when management isn’t around, which makes it a better experience.