Company: Deloitte
Date: 2010-01-30
Overall rating: 4/5
Employment status: current

A good firm to work for, with variable clients experiences depending on the federal organization.
Pros: - There are a lot of smart, inspiring people that provide excellent mentors if you seek them out, as they seem naturally predisposed to mentoring.
- The collegial work environment makes work more enjoyable and relationship-building with coworkers easy. 
- Input is generally respected regardless of level in the firm. Analyst perspectives are appreciated and often solicited.
- The rotational program allows analysts to experience different types of client work, which is really important in the federal sector, as there is a significant range in the type of work each project demands.
- Very reasonable hours compared to commercial consulting, flexibility to take time off when needed since managers tend to be very accommodating as long as requests are made in advance. 
- Involvement in community service groups and other activities is highly encouraged and there are many opportunities to get to know other Deloitte practitioners through these activities.
Cons: - Knowledge transfer varies dramatically from one team to the next, and often even from one individual on a team to the next (not all managers make consistent internal documentation a priority). In some cases this makes for a challenging onboarding experience.
- Some government clients can be very difficult to work with, either being unresponsive or over-eager to allocate as many of their responsibilities to the consultants as possible
- Engagements tend to be longer in the federal sector, so the higher up you get in the firm the longer you are expected to stay on a given project generally, which can force some to "specialize" (rather than trying out new things) sooner than they really wanted to. 
- Many of the higher-up team leads (senior consultants and above) have so much going on that they are unable to provide much-needed feedback until right before things are due.
- Some coworkers in the firm are so accustomed to leveraging existing firm materials that it reduces the amount of creativity and development of new approaches [I imagine this is a common issue across large consulting firms]