Company: PwC
Date: 2020-04-06
Overall rating: 2/5
Employment status: former
Experience level: Junior

I Had High Hopes When I Started
Pros: PwC has a very good benefits package, particularly with 20 days PTO for it's management team.
Cons: I worked for NIS, which is the Information Security part of its Internal Firm Services (IFS) group. My expectations were to work for a professional firm with processes and standards in place to either prevent or deal with security issues. 

To be fair, the firm has MANY processes. They don't follow all of them, but they do have many processes. When there is a need for new processes, management does not talk to the people who are doing the work to get their input. More than once I had a process to deal with issues, only to find it supplanted by someone else who had know idea what was going on internally. Any offers to provide input were seen as a challenge to the person who came up with the process.

As with many organizations, there are people in favor and then the rest of us. You may be praised one day and condemned the next because you aren't following a process that just got invented and was never communicated to you.

The problems within NIS come from a failure to listen. I recall an all-hands meeting in Tampa a couple of years ago. One member of the Sr. Leadership Team expressed concern because they provided training for certifications, yet some people never took the test. He said he had no idea why.

This was a perfect opportunity to ask why, as everyone was in the room. Instead, he just jumped to his next point. The Senior Leadership of NIS does not ask or listen. Instead, they jump to conclusions based upon their perception and then direct action without ever truly understanding what they're doing.

There is a great deal of employee stress due to management pressure. Management wants white glove service around the globe, but is unwilling to hire the number of people required to deliver the results they want. So instead of increasing the team appropriately, they just add more pressure on the existing team members. 

While working on a problem for one customer, you may be directed to immediately go support another customer. This kind of jumping around seems to have more to do with who yells the loudest rather than which issue has more business impact. The context switching from one task to another slows down the entire process, and the team's ability to function continues to decline while managers bark orders without comprehending the impact they cause.