Company: EY
Date: 2019-10-18
Overall rating: 1/5
Employment status: current
Experience level: Junior

Dysfunctional, Toxic, Frustrating
Pros: Competitive base pay

40 hour work weeks

Rapid accruing of vacation time; abundant sick and personal time off

Brand name for resume

Company-wide paid volunteer day

Generally flexible on work location and schedule

Reimbursement for gym memberships, health equipment, bikes, etc.

Reimbursement for cell phone bill
Cons: Built a new office in Nashville, TN to be a collaborative technology center, but the ramp up in offshore teams and contractors seems to be in conflict with this. Unclear if this office is just part of a greater tax scheme by the firm (no organizational transparency). But there is little meaningful work available for onshore teams. They managed to hire some pretty talented people here, but since no effort is given to listen to them on how to improve processes, they leave posthaste.

Lots of talk about software engineering best practices, but always immediate pressure to cut corners.

Mostly undesirable work across many of the projects (Excel (VBA), PowerBI, other archaic technologies). Prepare to forget web development and other coding skills from lack of use. The Firm doesn’t view technology as a competitive advantage. 

Dysfunctional relationship with the business: they pick the technical solutions and don’t trust engineers…so expect to TRY to build/maintain “enterprise” software that extends Microsoft Excel and other irrational ways to spend money. When something goes wrong with these hacky solutions, which is frequent, expect to drop everything mid-sprint.

Speaking a sprints, there is no real desire to have a healthy agile software development cycle or work intake process. Chaos is preferred here.

Many layers of management (most hired each other from another Big 4 firm) that only say buzzwords and will pretend to empower you to make positive change in the organization, but will block you by secretly empowering offshore teams to cut corners and create unmaintainable solutions with no code reviews, DevOps, etc. These layers of management also compound toxic relationship with the business.

Managers here are much more project focused and don’t really concern themselves with your career growth.

Other benefits are not great for a cash rich firm (no 401k matching the first year w/ a 5 year vesting period, small bonus w/ no input from your performance, just okay medical/dental coverage)

Charged for parking to come to the office. Nashville seems to be moving toward forcing employees to come into the office, but expect to have to sit in an open office area with your peers while all on the same phone calls with offshore teams for hours.

Promotion and career growth seems to be reserved for individuals with the moral flexibility to mislead the business into thinking we will deliver them a working product

Not much technical career growth or things to add to your resume since most of the technologies are archaic, COTS integration, or just the futility of time spent trying to enforce basic process with offshore teams.