Company: PwC
Date: 2016-09-15
Overall rating: 4/5
Employment status: former

Decent place to work
Pros: The flexibility and work-life balance is great.
Health benefits are okay, but the wellness rewards and HSA contributions are huge perks.
You can "flex" and leave early on Fridays if you've gotten all your hours in/work done
You can work from home once a week
There's a lot of free food
The office is very diverse and inclusive
When you're on the bench, you can do pretty much anything you want to grow and develop, and you can create pretty much any group you want for reinvestment activity, as long as you can make a good business case for it. 
There are huge learning opportunities, especially with technological skills. 
This is a really good place to start. If this is your first job, it'll be perfect for you and you can shape your path however you like. If you've got more professional experience, you'll probably get frustrated with the YoPro environment, but you can also shape a better path if you have the right attitude.
Cons: The MD has a very narrow view of what he considers good work- PwC has 5 dimensions of their professional framework, but Norm pretty much only focuses on technical abilities. 

There are a lot of young, entitled Type A's working here, and there's a lot of crossover between people's personal and professional lives- which is fine, but it can lead to too much office drama and too many distractions. People will talk over each other in meetings and take credit for other people's ideas regularly. Many people are guilty of committing to doing things when they want to speak up in a meeting and get their name recognized, but then they won't actually do what they say they're going to do, which can be very frustrating and can lead to a lot of wasted time if you're relying on them. 

Between the majority of the staff being very young and the reinvestment work (which are like your extra-curricular activities that you have to do as part of the office politics), the atmosphere feels like you're in high school. 

It's all politics. Even if your'e doing all the right things to get promoted, you still may not because it's not communicated to management, and Norm will tell you "that's just how it is" and you can't appeal their decision to not promote you, even if you prove their reasoning wrong. You're expected to rely on professional "champions" to fight for you, but that doesn't mean they'll communicate all of your accomplishments- or that Norm will recognize them. Also, if you're not on a project for a while (which is beyond your control), then you're basically screwed when it comes time for a promotion.