Company: EY
Date: 2013-03-30
Overall rating: 4/5
Employment status: former
Experience level: Junior

Better than most places.  Still tons of hours and travel.
Pros: Good salary and benefits (not great, considering the hours and travel). Looks great on a resume and very good experience, but the business consulting (non-internal audit) is a recent practice that they've been rebuilding since about 2008.  It's had a rapid growth and those joining now missed the bottom floor entry, but also many growing pains (like a huge lack of practice resources, tools, knowledge databases, etc.).  Still small in comparison to Deloitte, Accenture, but closing the gap.
Cons: Way more of an old boys club feel than other Big 4 firms.  Few women in business consulting (read: not tax or internal audit) above level of manager.  EY is not anti-women and the women that are there are outstanding and very pro-women.  It's just that the guys tend to go to lunch together and hang out together outside of work (not just at the associate/senior levels) so if you're not "one of the guys" it can be tough to build the strong relationships needed to get pulled in to sell work or be assigned to work on good projects. This may be a result of so many sr managers & partners returning to EY from Cap Gemini (EY consulting that was spun off in the late 90's) once their non-compete agreement w/EY expired.  From my experience and conversations with friends, KPMG and Deloitte seem more pro-female.  

Performance Improvement managers must average 45 hrs a week billable to be at 100% utilzation, but many clients only allow you to bill 40 hrs, so if this gives you very litle room during the year if you are between engagement.  Lots of people get hurt by this, especailly, if a client pushes back a start date and you're the subject matter resource for the project (and can't quickly be deployed elsewhere).