Company: Deloitte
Date: 2010-01-08
Overall rating: 3/5
Employment status: former

HUGE Company, NOT a Federal Services firm.  Very talent folks shackled with a huge infrastructure and overhead.
Pros: - Great "Lifestyle" bennies - gym reimbursement, volunteer work support
- Good information sharing tools across projects
- Broad Portfolio of work
- Some of the technology available is pretty slick (iPhones, Company Chat system, Time/Expense reporting..)
- Impressive company HQ.
Cons: - Lifestyle bennies are targeted at making the company look good
- HUGE! HUGE! Bench/Beach.  Lots of folks sitting around generating $0 revenue.
- This is an ACCOUNTING COMPANY.  Even as a consultant working in the Gov't marketspace, you'll be required to maintain financial independence from company's Deloitte has as accounting customers.  You will be forced to sell stock, monitor the individual investments in your mutual funds and have to pass up good investment opportunities.  In addition, you can't bank with company's that are customers (even if they have the best mortgage rates) and your relatives may have to quit their jobs if they're in a leadership postion with a customer company.  Expect to go nuts and expend significant amounts of time with this if you're hired as an experience professional and you have a good sized investment portfolio.
- Expect to change projects every 6 months.
- Expect to have 7+ bosses: project leadership, segment, sector, skill, technology, etc. etc.  Project leaders have little say in staffing.  Except for the project leadership, none of the others have any relevence to the work I actually do...seems like I was randomly mapped.  Each one of these bosses generates $0 revenue.
- Requirements for promotion are vague and shifting (probably due to the 7 bosses above).  Plan seems to be to not have hard metrics to meet so they can say "NO".  Going above Manager seems to involve a process similar to pledging a fraternity.  Managers can't explain what I need to do to make manager.
- Despite being "Federal Services", marketing focus is on Financial Management & Big Picture Strategy.
- Outside of the "Major" offices, no IT or other back office support.  In my case, I have to drive 2+ hours to get my computer fixed.  Lots of reach-back to India for real-time help.
- Technically, everyone works out of a "major" office.  If you're not physically there, all of your business cards and contact info will say you are.  Useless.
- Some of the technology is wacky or just plain bad.  Expect 2+ hours on the phone and a 4+ hour round trip drive to the nearest walk-up IT desk (remember, only in the "real" offices) after every MS patch is pushed to your machine because of the crap hard drive encryption used.  The good news is that it happens to everyone so you can car pool.
- NO PER DIEM, even if you're on a Fed Gov't and your contract pays the company at the per diem rate.  Direct reimbursement up to $50/day for meals.  No consideration for where you are.  I'm sure the difference between GSA and $50/day goes to all the folks generating $0 revenue.