Company: EY
Date: 2020-09-08
Overall rating: 1/5
Employment status: former
Experience level: Junior

Consider carefully, especially Managed Services teams
Pros: Benefits and time off
Holiday schedule
Cons: The leadership model in some parts of EY (managed services, in my experience) seem to lean on fear and intimidation as their motivation. The manager I had routinely put down members of the team, spoke of his disappointment with the team at large and constantly demanded near perfection. Rarely was good feedback given, and if it was, it was only after being lectured for 30 minutes on all the things you are doing incorrectly. On my second day (the week COVID lockdowns began), my manager was very explicit in saying I needed to come to the office to meet with him and others. When I got there, I pinged him asking when we would meet. He then let me know that he was working from home that day, and would not be meeting. He knew very clearly that I was taking public transit, had a young son at home and was concerned about COVID risks, but instructed me to go into the office anyway, and didn't bother telling me was WFH! 

I thought maybe it was a one off situation of a bad boss, but then I attended a meeting with my manager, other managers in our area and the director over these managers. The director was incredibly rude, interrupted regularly, stopped the meeting frequently to take other calls, and most importantly, berated the managers the same exact way I had observed my manager do.

It was not anything that would go against company policies or even worth reporting but it was very telling. Their leadership style was purely negative and top down type leadership with very little understanding of what is actually going on, how the tech works, etc. The only thing they were worried about was looking impressive to the client via Powerpoints and meaningless reports. 

If you want to learn to speak buzzword soup and sound impressive, this is your place. If you wish to learn and grow your skillset, this likely isn't the place for you. 

The people on my team routinely complained to me that there were no learning and growth opportunities besides "leadership", which was really just ordering others around and filling out word docs and excel sheets. 

I was told I was being hired for my specific skillset and would be asked to help bring the team along technically, with opportunities to stretch into other types of technical work I wished to do. Instead, I was quickly told I would begin being groomed to be a manager, and all of my work was administrative in nature. This was extremely frustrating, as I had been very clear during the process that I was not interested in that type of work. To make matters worse, my manager would routinely give me work documenting things that had already been done (but he misplaced, forgot about, didn't complete, etc). When I would complete the work, he would be upset with it, stating it did not fit his criteria he requested. I began taking detailed notes and called him on it the next time it happened, which he brushed off and continued to ask me to redo the work again to his new, alternate specs, that he did not inform me about until the work was complete.

The client's work environment was very negative. Other teams rarely completed work in a timely fashion or correctly. Instead of holding that team responsible, they would speak negatively of EY teams and blame them. The people I worked with at the client were rarely available to provide adequate access or background knowledge to complete tasks they assigned. 

The final nail in the coffin for me was that it was made obvious to me that working on another project would be nearly impossible. Managed Services employees are handled differently than typical consultants at EY, and are not typically allowed to move to different projects in the same niche, let alone trying to move to a different niche in Cyber security.