Company: KPMG
Date: 2020-04-29
Overall rating: 2/5
Employment status: former
Experience level: Confirmed

Worst professional experience of my career
Pros: Benefits are great. In addition to great medical, vision and occasional “thank you” gifts, they actually have an actual pension plan. Yes, a pension. So if you stick around for 4 years or more, you'll get an additional bit of money from the firm to make up for your mental scars. I think the pension depends on your career level, so be sure to confirm you qualify.
Cons: If you've worked for other Big 4 firms you probably know what you're getting into, but this job is far and away the worst professional experience of my life. 
Essentially, this firm expects you to make all of your personal life available for them, even if you want to be considered just an average employee. If you're high-performing, you are definitely living this job. 
If you added up all the time they expect you to work during time off, you could probably get an extra side job. While they talk a good game about work-life balance, it's frowned upon behind the scenes.
One side-effect of expecting everyone to work all the time, is leadership doesn't do much planning. Why plan when you can just wing everything and if things go horribly off schedule, you just ask your dedicated team to donate their weekends and evenings to getting you back on track? In short, they value brute, hard work over “smart work.” Staying up all night or working over the weekend is a badge of courage and leads to a culture of bragging about who sacrificed more than anyone else.
Finally, there is no KPMG standard for work products. Every director has their own personal, quirky idea of what good performance is, but they act like their ideas are absolute and objective. So as you move from project to project, the expectations for your work vary wildly. So if you're a good brown-noser who can sniff out and mindlessly imitate your leadership's own idea of what good performance looks like, you'll be fine. If you don't, you'll be subjected to your higher ups giving non-constructive, nearly abusive criticism which boils down to you generally sucking or are kind of a dummy. 
As expected, promotions are mysteriously highly correlated to being super besties with leadership who always find a way to spin people into promotions regardless of actual performance metrics.
Somehow, I found a way to survive more than a few miserable years at KPMG. I think I have PTSD.