Toxic culture with focus on billability over well-being
Pros
A great place to work if you are ultra extroverted, have sociopathic tendencies such as manipulating others, superficiality and lack of guilt. Great benefits but come at a cost, reducing your tax free allowance and aren’t clear or upfront about it. Diverse range of projects to get involved in if gatekeepers of projects decide to include you in their projects and are in a good enough position to have a strong pipeline so as to not feel threatened. Decent salaries as long as you belong to a certain demography, otherwise they try keeping your hourly rate and thus salary as low as possible for squeezing your skills out to clients. Good if you are lucky to join the right team, but the pattern described is reflected across the business.
Cons
Frequent mental health breakdowns since there is a big mismatch between markets and practices, leaving some practices to both win and deliver work. They don’t look beyond billability in terms of employee KPIs. The leadership is just focused on hitting their targets and earning their bonus, whilst themselves having zero billability target outside of ensuring that their practice is productive. Long work hours, thankless work and previous achievements are soon forgotten if billability drops. Multiple practices doing the same work, Directors competing for glory starting new practices with fancy titles and multiple staff moving between these practices operating in silos with no collaboration. Bad for your mental health and can lead to lose sense of yourself when you work with individuals who are not selfless.
