Company: Deloitte
Date: 2013-01-08
Overall rating: 2/5
Employment status: current

Too many cooks in the kitchen creating busy work at a 2nd tier consulting firm
Pros: 1.  Flexibility - consulting lifestyle is that you are on a project or on the beach.  When on the beach, you get a breather provided that you aren't overwhelmed with too many extracurricular activities (see Con #1 about creating work).  Usually, consulting employees are at the client site during Monday through Thursday.  Employees are encouraged to go to the office on Fridays though a good bulk tend to work from home.

2.  People - generally people are pretty nice.  As with all large organizations, you will have bad apples.  Based on my experience most "bad apples" are bad because they are incompetent though there are a few who are just good-old fashioned jerks.

3.  Can be good for early career - unless you dream of being a partner, this could theoretically be a decent job for new college where they can see a variety of companies across a number of industries.  The reality is that in the 2-3 years before analysts and consultants move on (either to an MBA program or another job), young person fresh out of college has to be lucky to get on a variety of assignments.  Unfortunately, even the firm has a 6 month rotation policy, I have seen some individuals who got "stuck" on assignments where they were there for a year or longer or isolated to a single industry.  A number of factors may contribute to this phenomenon (see Con #2).
Cons: 1.  Policies and incentives motivate people to manufacture work, creating a "Gotta stay busy!  Busy! Busy! Busy!" environment..  The "where leaders thrive" logo is a good metaphor for "where people create work so they can show the leadership how dedicated and committed they are to the firm".  The result is that there is a plethora of requests to help with numerous initiatives that people have created to show that they are a future leader of the firm.  I'm all about immersing yourself into your work to produce a product of the highest caliber but in this case, the firm's policies drive individuals to over-engineer solutions and create busy-work that ultimately cause everybody to waste time.  This is why there are "too many cooks in the kitchen".

2.  Good work alone is not enough; you need to be "in the club".  Deloitte has a pretty arduous process for examining an employee's performance and they do try to make it objective.  At the end of the day, however, it is still people interpreting opinions of other people - you aren't taking a standardized test.  Therefore, since employees generally care about their performance review, it is in the employee's favor to do as they are asked on a project which sometimes includes decisions outside of the firm's policy.  Examples include a) 6 month rotation policy where a junior employee (analyst or consultant) is asked to stay long-term on a project (see Pro #3 about the 6 month rotation policy), b) accurately report hours worked (see Con #3).  Thus, if an employee wants a good rating for his or her project, then they will need to "be a team player".  The second part of the "in the club" issue is that an employee has to be well-known and liked by numerous senior practitioners.  Unfortunately, good work along is not enough because if you are doing great project work but don't spend enough time "networking" and doing extracurricular work (proposals, writing papers, organizing events, recruiting, etc.), then you may now be well-known and/or well-liked and essentially, not be "in the club".  Unfortunately, networking and completing "extracurricular work" can't help your performance or bonus but they can certainly hurt if you don't do them.

3.  Regarding "accurately report hours worked", I have been on projects where we were not allowed to bill more than 45 hours per week even though I worked until late nights and weekends.  When this happens, project leaders often use the "you need to be more efficient" excuse so they feel justified in capping overworked employees to 45 hours.  While I could have easily showed Friday PM emails requesting completed assignments by Monday AM, nobody is going to take the time to evaluate whether or not the post-45 hours were a result of an employee's inefficiency or poor project management.  Normally, I would not care about this however, due to the firm's "Gotta stay busy! Busy! Busy! Busy!" environment (see Con #1), if at the end of the year, an employee only reported 45 hours per week but didn't participate in enough extracurricular activities or network enough, then he/she runs the risk of being deemed as "not committed and dedicated"...

4.  Deloitte Consulting is not intellectually challenging enough because there are not enough quality projects.  Every firm has good and bad projects but a good bulk of Deloitte's simply involve staff augmentation where a client doesn't have enough bodies and we are treated as temporary workers, fulfilling ad-hoc, menial tasks such as setting up projectors or other administrative tasks.  These activities are hidden under the shroud of a "project".  For example, there is currently a project where Deloitte is supplying analysts and consultants (junior employees) to review bank loans for a minimum of 6 months.  Given the interest profile of new graduates who come into consulting, I do not believe that any thought that they would be performing such monotonous work.  Unfortunately, during recruiting, potential recruits are told about how exciting and interesting the work is and how marketing they will be after having worked for Deloitte (see Con #5).

5.  Too much "spin" - I've often felt that I was tricked into an assignment where a project leader tells me about some assignment that sounded aligned with my interests, only to be disappointed by an "Aha... I've been duped" moment.  For example, one practitioner told me about a corporate development opportunity but wouldn't share details.  After committing, I later found out that we were going to produce a list of best practices and an organization structure that an insurance company could use in order to help facilitate their M&A decisions.  Given the objectives, I felt that this assignment was tangential to corporate development since we weren't actually analyzing or executing on potential acquisitions or divestitures.  This has caused me to very cynical when I'm being proposed onto projects.