Deloitte reviews

A few quotes that sum up my experience: -"By nature of the profession we all chose to be in, we must be responsive to our clients 24 hours a day." -Senior Manager -"Not a lot of fulfillment in this job - making rich white men more rich. But you can make a lot of money." -Principal -“You can take a break for dinner.” -Managing Director Toxic culture and values: -Self-serving, everyone for themselves mentality -It's all about sales and what you can do to sell the next project. It didn't seem like leaders on my teams really cared about long term value for clients -On multiple projects, I had managers who spoke negatively of clients, talking about them being stupid or making fun of them in some way -I had managers (on multiple projects) that misrepresented information to clients / mislead clients into believing things that weren't true Projects: -Projects are mundane and boring -Stereotypical of why people hate consultants. For example, doing work that is supposed to be an “independent point of view” but not actually doing any analysis then just taking exactly what the project sponsor wants and pitching it to other functions as “an independent point of view” or teeing up the sale of a multi-million dollar technology implementation that the client may or may not even need (hard to tell, considering we didn't do any real analysis) -Very little can be trusted in a proposal. What you’re seeing is a deck of recycled slides that have been reformatted, a bunch of logos of “big name clients” (that this project team hasn’t personally served) and a bunch of senior Deloitte people with expertise in the area (that won’t actually contribute to the project beyond the sale) Work (for a BA in S&O): -Expectation is more about hours spent in front of a laptop rather than getting actual work done. From my experience, it seemed like many people were doing 4-5 hours of real work a day while being forced to sit in front of their laptop for an additional 10-12 hours -No ownership of work; no autonomy -Difficult to get feedback from managers. In my experience they never made time or constantly rescheduled (until the project was done) -Almost entirely project management and slide making -Being a task rabbit (getting lunch for your manager, printing documents, etc.). On one project, the manager had me get him his lunch every day for the entire project -Managers will not let you bill your actual hours (even if it’s a fixed fee project!). This means you’ll be logging 45 hours in the system while working 60-70 hours a week. And note that the hours logged do NOT affect the billing to the client on a fixed fee project. This is literally a partner taking advantage of the people they call “staff” or “resources” to maintain profitability on their projects. And it’s a sorry excuse to understaff projects then overwork the team

--Federal positions are mostly staff augmentation even though the firm claims to provide "strategic consulting." To make matters worse, the firm doesn't even provide high-quality staff aug and instead stuffs projects full of overqualified practitioners and has them do work one or two levels below their skill level (i.e. note-taking, aligning text in power point slides, performing basic excel functions, etc.) --Stiff, hierarchical culture --Career progression depends more on participation in largely meaningless "firm activities" rather than executing high-quality client work --Most federal practitioners are capped at 40 hours per week, which sounds good until you find out that many people "ghost" hours to keep up with work demands while not exceeding their cap, and add in some bs firm activities and you can be working 50-60 hrs per week performing rote and unrewarding tasks --Morale is low. Most people in Federal are somewhere between bored and miserable, but the pressure to pretend to find the work meaningful and enjoyable is high and serious ass-kissing is required to advance, which makes for a strange dynamic in which unhappy people plaster smiles on their faces and compete to paint a rosy picture of their grossly exaggerated contributions to the firm and its clients --Federal clients don't use Deloitte effectively, which isn't necessarily the firm's fault, but it makes the firm an accomplice in wasting taxpayer money --Deloitte has an inferiority complex vis a vis MBB, Federal has a major inferiority complex vis a vis commercial, and human capital has the same re: S&O and tech, which make Deloitte Federal Human Capital an especially unpleasant place to be --For all of the reasons above, high-performers have and continue to leave the firm in droves