Company: PwC
Date: 2020-12-01
Overall rating: 3/5
Employment status: former
Experience level: Confirmed

Exploitation as a Business Model
Pros: Great quality people and connections. This organization is a sales, management, and relationship company above all. They are not the best at what they do (despite the polished constant stream of fluff internal and external marketing). They rely pretty much entirely on their pre-existing financial assurance relationships to sell more work. Lots of opportunity to work in a wide variety of areas and industries so long as you keep active in your relationship building. Pretty easy business case to train and grow. Be decisive and stay committed to your intended career direction, and try not to be too flexible or you'll get easily lost. Speak up and be real about what you want - the coaching culture and support was amazing and will pleasantly surprise you if you pick your relationships right. Get what you need (training, relationships, exposure) and get out (unless you want to make partner). Lots of free and excellent training opportunities. Good parties for the young ones (pre-COVID). Pick your team wisely.
Cons: Hit and miss opportunities. Often you don't get to pick what you want to do, so you have to be OK with floating in the wind; subject to the whims of whatever client gets snagged in the marketing snares. Org structure makes things ridiculous - you'll probably report to 20 managers at some point who seem to make an active point of not talking to each other to actually resource manage (despite the titles). You will work long hours because of this ineffective management style. Very top heavy and political once you see through the fluff marketing. Meetings are nearly all day past a certain point, leaving barely any room to get any actual work done. The company does NOT value actual work (only sales and profits) and WILL treat you like a cog to be exploited as much as possible to a fault. The company is not as clever as they think they are in terms of its exploitative nature, and a complete inability to retain good people that actually get work done will be its eventual downfall. Peter principle reigns. HR is virtually non-existent. Titles are laughable - directors will have one or two managers reporting to them, each of which is most likely a glorified project manager and will be lucky to have any staff reports at all (despite external appearances). 

So brain-washy it isn't even funny. If you start your career here you won't even know the difference (by design). Don't get caught up and be very mindful of any non-chargable "make work" admin overhead company initiatives. They are 99.9% ploys by a director or partner to make them look good on the back of your personal "voluntold" time. Exploitation and team building on their own don't work when the entire company is doing it to each other, so there's nobody left to actually do the work. Que more overtime.