Company: EY
Date: 2015-06-10
Overall rating: 3/5
Employment status: former
Experience level: Junior

Your experience is a Russian roulette depending on which team you'll end up with.
Pros: Will pay for your qualification, back office roles are nice and you will meet good people. Also, it will look really good on your CV.
Cons: DISCLAIMER: This review applies only to client facing staff. Back office roles and teams are much much better.

Basically, an overpriced Temp Staffing Agency, but where its "consultants" can’t even control the location or the client to which they are sent to like indentured servants. HR spins out propaganda and feel-good rhetoric every week, but the Partnes do not want to invest a penny in the worker bees as that would detract them form taking all the profit for themselves and going for expensive lunches with the clients. Few people stay more than 2 years unless they're Manger and above, are foreigners or have to finish their qualification (and once it’s done they leave or stay if they truly hate themselves). Since EY sponsors visas, they get a lot of very good Indian and Asian talent who have to keep working for EY or they can’t remain in UK (XXI century slavery kind of thing). Self-respecting professionals have to work in cafeteria, break out rooms or fight each other for study rooms. It’s no better than setting up your work station up in McDonald’s. Facetime and chargeable hours is king! If you are not putting 40 hours a week on your timesheet you are tagged as slacker not eligible for raise/promotion. So you have people running around desperately trying to figure out how they can create more pointless work for themselves. This culture does not favour automation and efficiency; it favours manual repetitive work that takes up the most time, so that more hours can be put on the timesheet. Annual reviews are a farce, and cronyism reigns supreme and unless you suck up all year to your superiors you can forget about good rating (your performance rarely counts as facetime and sucking up is the most important thing). Lower level staff can review their bosses but reviews are questioned and if you mention anything bad you’re life turns into hell. Once you hurt the pride of your Manager all their professionalism goes out the window and they start acting like they’re back in high school. The managers use the reviews to subjugate and control lower level staff. Do anything the manager doesn’t like and he or she will make sure to make it plainly obvious to you that he will bury you with a bad review meaning no raise or promotion for you. It doesn’t matter that your team with whom you work on a daily basis thinks you are doing a superb job. In addition Managers just love to give you artificial deadlines so you’d work until late or many long days in a row just for their sheer enjoyment. After you deliver the work and barely standing, they will not look at it for a week and then complain about quality (which obviously suffered due to artificial time constraints). Just to reiterate again, if you are not kissing a you know what of your manager, you won’t get a good review hence the epidemic of yes-man brownnosing. Overall truly terrible culture. Would not recommend to anyone.