Company: Deloitte
Date: 2016-06-08
Overall rating: 4/5
Employment status: former

Good People But Be Careful
Pros: Most employees are smart, hard-working, and dependable. 
Lots of diversity. I enjoyed working with colleagues from India, Latin America, China, Europe, and the US.
A competitive environment that is always striving to be the best and be innovative.
Great benefits and PTO (I started with 5 weeks)
Plenty of social activities and company sponsored happy hours
Real commitment to helping the community and volunteering (the much ballyhooed Impact Day is only one of many community service initiatives and projects that go on)
There are lots of opportunities for professional development - learning both soft skills and new technologies
Leadership is very accessible, experienced, and deserve to be where they are.
Lots of flexibility in working hours and trust in employees to manage themselves.
Lots of variety is available if you want to move around to different projects.
Cons: The big huge one is the culture of workaholism.  Almost everyone at Deloitte works over 40 hours a week. Deloitte expects about a minimum of about 40 hours of billable work a week from lower level employees and depending on your project you might get a lot of pressure to work a lot (50-60 hours a week) more. When you add to that the pressure to work on non-billable projects part-time, I found myself working late a lot. This culture starts from the top, leadership works harder than anyone. If you get on a good project, you can manage to maintain a reasonable work life balance but if you don't you're in line for some serious burnout. I saw a lot of good people burn out in my 4.5 years there. 

Deloitte hires a lot of subcontractors on H1B visas as developers and international students. These guys often felt trapped in jobs they didn't like and working hours they didn't like because they were very restricted in their legal ability to change jobs. This is great for Deloitte's profits but not so much for company morale.

There is a definite pecking order between the different career tracks. The Consulting track gets lots of little perks, opportunities, and higher pay than people in the US Delivery Center (the Solution Engineer track). This career track is very exclusive too they make it hard to switch into it. One can argue that more is expected from those in the Consulting track but it still doesn't feel great when they get invited to things that you don't get invited to.

Deloitte has a business first culture which can be frustrating to developers who are working on all their tech consulting projects. They make noises about being "tech-first" but management is very slow to fund technical improvements that software engineers value (unit testing, dev-ops, software licenses, etc). Also, there are too few talented developers to go around for the size of the software projects that are undertaken which leads to bad code and maintenance nightmares. Top technical talent tends not to stick around long because they can get better pay and fewer hours elsewhere.