Company: Deloitte
Date: 2017-11-15
Overall rating: 1/5
Employment status: former
Experience level: Junior

Career Advancement is A Numbers Game (Great for Some, Frustrating for Others)
Pros: - Deloitte is a large company with a broadly-recognized brand. It's adds brand-power to your resume, if you choose to leave Deloitte
- There is a formula and a regular cadence for career advancement, which means that you can fairly easily determine what you need to do to be promoted
- There are some truly amazing people in the Consulting arm, especially in the ex-Monitor alumni pool
Cons: - As mentioned in the pros, advancement at Deloitte is highly formulaic. Deloitte rates each employee on a 1-5 scale at a yearly meeting with office leadership, where you are represented by someone more senior than you. It's important to note that there is a pre-determined number of any given rating that will be rewarded (i.e., if you happen to have an analyst class consisting entirely of top-performers in a particular year, a pre-determined number of them will be given the lowest score... that's all I'm going to say on that topic). Beyond the allocated number of ratings per year, there's another large issue: the performance review is designed such that your politics is weighted at least as heavily as client work (i.e., quality of work product and being a team player). This is not specific to the junior levels: I knew brilliant, hard-working managers who weren't promoted because they didn't network with the "right" senior managers, or because they prioritized signing on for projects that were genuinely interesting to them over ones that were mundane but drove a lot of revenue for Deloitte.
- Because advancement is a numbers game, there is a culture of fear at all levels around your review number. What this means in practice: spending copious hours of your "off-work-hours" on extracurricular firm activities to pad your "value to the company", grueling through poorly managed projects with heavy travel schedule to make sure your utilization (the number of hours that can be billed to a client) stays above the minimum threshold, constantly feeling pressure to network even if it means acting like someone who you truly aren't.
- Because utilization is emphasized as heavily as it is, if you're low on client-billable hours (say, because your project ended right before the holidays when no work sells), you can be pressured / essentially forced on to projects that hinder your career (i.e., don't develop skills of interest) and your personal life (due to cross-county travel schedules for weeks or months on end).
- Fraternity culture. Heavy drinking, judgement from peers if you prioritize spending time maintaining non-work friendships or relationships over drinking after work on Fridays with coworkers.
- Personal boundaries don't exist with regard to work-life balance. Client service is tough for maintaining work-life balance, but it is especially difficult at Deloitte (again, see fear culture around getting a good number at year-end review and on your current project). I can't count the number of times I was called on my personal phone at dinner with friends on the rare week I was working in my home city to deal with client work, by someone who was more senior than me, and feeling like I couldn't push back.