Smart people but poor management, dry culture, awful work life balance
Pros
- You will get exposure to C-suite as a 22 year old - Will develop strong analytical skills very quickly - Given a large amount of responsibility and autonomy very quickly - Get very specialized in pricing, which is a pro if you're really interested in it - Get the chance to party in Germany for a week in December - Free breakfast once a week
Cons
- 80% employees are white males who went to prestigious universities and majored in business / STEM; in that respect the culture is extremely homogenous; expect to have a lot of conversations about last night's basketball game - management has taken few concrete steps to increase diversity; instead they make empty promises / vague statements that are not actually implemented - literally no support system for women, POC, or LGBTQ. There's not even an effort to pretend to care. - promotion driven strictly by favoritism; you will only get promoted if you network aggressively with partners; this is especially difficult if you're not a white male as the vast majority of partners are white males - lack of transparency from management around decision-making - terrible work life balance; you will sometimes get asked to work until 2am doing work to meet the next day's deadline only to find out later the work is not necessary - relationships feel transactional. Partners just want analysts to get the work done as quickly as possible; they demonstrate very little interest in your life / development - you will be accountable for every single second working; I had to ask my manager to even go on 30 minute walks. Sometimes the answer was, "please limit to 20 minutes." - most people have not heard of Simon Kucher due to poor branding, so it's not that impressive on a resume. - underpaid relative to competitors - overall, I truly don't know anybody at Simon Kucher who is genuinely happy working there. Morale is extremely low; most people want to quit but are sticking it out for 2 - 3 yrs
