Company: Deloitte
Date: 2015-06-28
Overall rating: 3/5
Employment status: former
Experience level: Confirmed

Deloitte: We keep you alive to serve this ship. So row well, and live.
Pros: (1)  You will build relationships with a variety of smart, motivated people that you can carry with you long into the future. Networking is a large component of the culture. Deloitte is a very large place, but over time you can build a small circle of trusted colleagues that will make Deloitte feel much smaller and less impersonal.
(2)  Deloitte offers good compensation and benefits. This includes very generous paternity/maternity leave. Deloitte pays up to $500 per year as a health/fitness subsidy. Good educational benefits are available if you pursue another degree or a firm-approved certification.
(3)  Having Deloitte on your resume may open up many new opportunities for your career. If you can succeed in Deloitte’s culture, then it speaks well of your abilities to perform under pressure.
(4)  You will be offered an abundance of training. Deloitte University is an excellent facility.
(5)  Most anyone is accessible if you take the initiative to contact them for a meeting.
(6)  Working to support the mission of the federal government can be very rewarding if you find the right project. However, this benefit is not specific to Deloitte, only to federal consulting.
(7)  Great place to start a career for those coming out of college, but I’m less inclined to recommend Deloitte to those with significant experience unless you can make peace with the cons detailed below.
Cons: (1)  Long Hours - At all levels, expect to put in at least 45-50 hours per week on average (sometimes much more) in order to meet expectations including client work, recruiting, training delivery, proposal writing, performance management duties, counseling to junior practitioners, etc. In my experience, this is not mentioned to candidates during the hiring process.
(2)  Summer - Work-life balance can be poor for many at the Manager level and above in the federal practice, especially during federal’s summer buying season. Frequent participation in proposal activities will be expected and often involves late nights, weekend work, conference calls at all hours, and disrupted vacations.
(3)  Work-Life Balance - Deloitte stopped using “work-life balance” and replaced it with “work-life fit.” Leadership talks a lot about flexibility, meaning that various PPDs still give you enough to fill 50 hours/week but if you choose to leave at 4pm to coach little league baseball, you are given the flexibility to work from 8pm-10pm to make up the extra hours you “owe” the firm. If you try to create balance, it will be very difficult to say no to extracurricular opportunities (especially to a PPD) and you may be branded with the dreaded “not a team player” label.
(4)  Vacation - Paid time off appears generous, however at all career levels you will either not be able to use it all or you will have to work extra hours to make up for the vacation time you use in order to meet your billable hour targets. After a few years, most senior people will begin to lose large chunks of unused vacation each calendar year as you can only carry over one year’s worth of vacation.
(5)  Client Projects – Ask for as much detail as possible about the project you would be working on before accepting an offer. Your job satisfaction comes in a far second to the firm’s bottom line if they are in need of people to staff upcoming contracts. I have seen Business Technology Analysts (BTA) who were hired to do technical work be relegated to writing weekly status reports all day for a PMO. Many highly-skilled people hired with the promise of performing advanced data analytics are withering away on long-term projects with no such work to be found. 
(6)  High-Performance Culture – We are told that Deloitte has a “high-performance” culture. Translation: Everyone is competing in order to get the best year-end rating within a forced ranking structure. You can occasionally, at the more senior levels, expect to have others take credit for your work, be cut out of sales metrics you rightfully earned, or have materials that you have written "borrowed" by others without attribution. It is difficult to get PPDs to stomp this behavior out (sometimes they are the ones doing it to you) or to stick their necks out to get you the credit you deserve. In my experience, PPDs are reluctant to confront other PPDs if there is nothing in it for them personally, even if someone is clearly doing something underhanded to you.
(7)  Leadership Accountability - Real, accountable leaders within Deloitte’s matrix structure are rare. It feels like every PPD can boss you around, but no one is directly accountable for your care and feeding. For junior staff, no one above you is going to get in trouble if you sit on the bench. That is solely your fault, even if your leadership is not bringing in enough new business. For managers, if a PPD makes a string of poor decisions on which business opportunities to pursue, he or she will not be held accountable for your lower sales and revenue metrics if nothing pans out for all your hard work. Performance review committee meetings always focus on the individual under review and what that person did to help themselves. No one is held accountable for helping those below them be successful. Keep in mind that this lack of leadership accountability holds true for many other use cases. The risks are very much transferred to the individual at Deloitte much like an experiment in Social Darwinism.
(8)  Kiss Up Kick Down - Performance reviews come almost exclusively from your supervisors. The channel to collect feedback from peers/subordinates is very weak and contributes almost nothing to your year-end rating. If you have a bad project manager above you there is limited recourse available. Without hard evidence, your word will rarely be taken over someone at a higher career level. If your challenges are with a PPD, good luck getting someone to step in unless the behavior is truly egregious.
(9)  Like Having Two Jobs - At times, it will feel like internal Deloitte activities are a major distraction from your client work. If you care deeply about client work and want to focus on that exclusively, it may be an uphill battle for you on performance ratings, compensation, promotions, and ultimately it may affect your job security as you will be seen as “not contributing to the firm.” Deloitte now has a “Project Delivery” career track for people exclusively aligned to client work, but these people receive lower benefits compared to the other career tracks and may be subject to swift termination if a contract ends. Understand which career track you are being aligned to, and the differences, before accepting an offer.