Company: Deloitte
Date: 2012-11-25
Overall rating: 3/5
Employment status: current
Experience level: Junior

One of the best learning experiences out there, but not what they sell you
Pros: Surrounded by incredibly smart people, practitioners are involved in high-impact decision-making at some of largest companies out there.  Between client work and firm initiatives, employees significantly improve their entire professional skillset (soft skills, project management, technical abilities and general business knowledge across multiple industries and functions).  The paycheck is also nice.

Overall, I think Deloitte Consulting is one of the best places to begin a professional career.  As a learning experience, it is unparalleled.
Cons: Work is always a top priority, and it doesn't take much prying to hear senior practitioners express their discontent with the lack of work-life balance.  

Contrary to what you will hear during recruiting season, you do not have a lot of influence over the work you do.  There is such pressure to meet required metrics for year-end reviews, that you basically are forced to jump on the first opportunity that presents itself, even if it isn't something you're interested in.

In addition to the lack of control over client work, you can only be seen as a top performer if you spend many additional hours working on "firm initiatives" (on top of whatever other work you have).  While this can be seen as a great way to give practitioners control over their environment, this unwritten requirement is the subject of most complaints I hear from ALL practitioners I've spoken with (junior and senior).

In terms of the company's future, most growing service lines are composed of cookie-cutter type work that Deloitte repeats from client to client, and it is readily apparent that everything is geared towards sales/revenue growth; as opposed to providing high-quality, client-specific services.

An unsustainable partnership/pension structure paints a foreboding picture of a point in the future when growth slows and the lavish payouts to former leaders push the company into insolvency.  If this pattern continues, the company will seek to cut costs by asking more and more of current practitioners, which is already becoming apparent today.

One example of this is the fact that partners sell projects based on each practitioner working 45 hours/week.  Because of this, there is constant pressure to only bill 45 hours a week, even while you may be working closer to 80.  This helps senior practitioners meet sales goals by sacrificing the performance metrics of junior practitioners (i.e. at the end of the year, an analyst who worked 45 hours/week for a client and 10 hours/week on firm initiatives will look much better than an analyst who worked 75 hours/week on client work and 2 hours/week on firm initiatives).  Based on this concept, junior practitioners are incentivized to avoid complex client work in favor of spending more time on firm development.  This helps the short term goal of sales growth while hurting the development of talent and employee satisfaction.  I would look like the best analyst in the firm if I was on a project where I could bill 45 hours/week to the client while actually only working 30, and then spending an additional 15 hours/week working on firm activities.

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Long story short, if you join the Deloitte Consulting today looking to retire as a partner, you had better be ready to sacrifice many other parts of your life to make that happen.  You should also realize that if you chose to make Deloitte your long-term home, your life as a senior practitioner will look nothing like the lives of senior practitioners today.

Deloitte is a great springboard job, but it's not worth spending the best years of your life chained to a laptop and cell phone.  Especially when current leadership is clearly looking to maximize their own pensions at the expense of the future well-being of the firm.