Company: Deloitte
Date: 2012-12-05
Overall rating: 2/5
Employment status: current

With Great Company Comes Great & Many Work (all you can have)
Pros: Great office culture. Great co-workers to work with. Very smart people and competitive environment. Made several good friends here with peers and managers. Many CPE trainings available (more than necessary perhaps). Management trying to be visible by sending email communication & words of inspiration/encouragements/accomplishments frequently.
Cons: - LONG HOURS of WORK - I mean ALL YEAR ROUND with an average of 40-60 billable hours every month (and they said that it's normal for a senior to have such hours. The higher level you are, the more hours you work!). There are 4 busy seasons due to SEC clients work, and during non-SEC busy seasons, we are busy with the private clients' work.
 
- They have sort of like facebook profile of Deloitte. When I first hired, I felt weird about it. But it turned out, after working such long hours, what you know is only Deloitte people, Deloitte events, Deloitte way, because you have no life outside work. Deloitte is like a world in itself. Maybe other big four CPA firms also similar, but who knows?? They all probably the same.. 

- Deloitte provided many training materials (CPEs) all you want. I even had a total of approx. 120 CPE credits within 2 years when I renewed my CPA license (when we only need 80 hours CPE for 2 years), but honestly I probably only retained less than 40% of what I learned because their training always at the same time with lots of work. Basically, the online training is right at the same time during the worst busy season time ever, so how can they expect us to learn and work at the same time? 
 
- I don't hear much term "work/life balance" in Deloitte. They call it "career-life fit", which means that you fit your career into your life, and most of the time, your life has to be adjusted by your career. This means that you will check your email regularly and will be expected to work at flexible hours even weekends or nights! For example, clients sent us work at friday 3 pm, and they expect us to finish work on Monday morning. You still have to work sometimes even when you're taking holidays. 

- We work with India collegues, which means that sometimes we're expected to work between 5 pm and 2 am in the morning to answer their questions.  The collegues in India have two shifts, early morning (starts at 6 am) & late morning (starts at 11 am) to accomodate with the U.S. time. 

This is actually a great company to work for. I really like the people and the culture. We also have a lot of social & fun events. The people here are cool. However, the amount of work and the amount of ADMIN work we need to do, is tremendous beyond expectation. People who grew up starting from fresher in Deloitte didn't felt that they're working that many hours (to them it's normal), but for experienced hires, who have tasted a work-life balance outside Deloitte, will have a very different perspective. At the beginning is fine, but after being overwork for a while, then you realized "what am I doing here? and why do I do this?" 

You need a very strong will to survive here. I think the only way to survive here is to not complain about the amount of work and just be thankful that you are still alive after working so many hours.....