1) You are just a number. The 21 free counseling sessions make sense once you start. EY, as a whole, treats its people like disposable garbage. The consulting partners make their bonuses by selling projects to unwitting clients at a 40-50% margin, which means they are often staffing the projects as thin as possible and lying to clients about what EY can "bring to the table." How do I know this? We, the lower ranks, made the pricing plans and it's demoralizing to see the business model. They will put kids fresh out of school, with zero experience or context, into projects on their own.
2) EY will make false promises to bait anyone to join. I took a step back in my career by coming here. I was told that I would be focused on a certain space, but I watched as most of my team did scrum and audit roles. I spent months working on proposals that went nowhere. I quickly realized that many clients have little respect for EY's brand. There are few opportunities internally, and most teams were way worse than mine.
3) For a business built on sales, they are horrible at selling. Their entire strategy is to wear down clients they met at networking sessions and summits, and to harass them on LinkedIn and over text. I sat through a seminar where they brought in an "expert" to teach Senior Managers to make friends with their clients. We came across clients that I knew personally and had more than 1 partner tell me to back off, so I watched as they ruined the deal or oversold to a budget-tight client.
4) EY will promote the mediocre suck-ups with egos. The best people, who were good at sales and delivery AND had natural leadership skills, had promotions dangled in front of them for years.
5) As much as EY tries to frame itself as a technology company, if clients only knew how horrible our systems were, they would run for the hills. Its accounting functions are even worse. It took over 4 months for them to close out a project and reclassify expenses. Countless time was wasted on reclassifying expenses.
6) You will spend countless hours putting together useless proposals for work that has <1% probability of win. I worked on proposals with zero chance of win since we can't do delivery work for our audit clients, yet they still wanted to send something over to "continue the conversation." The conversation can be continued if your partners had an ounce of interpersonal skills, instead of wasting the time of 10 colleagues across ranks.
7) When I announced I was leaving, HR gave a lecture about how irresponsible I was for not giving a 4-week notice period. Meanwhile, my counselor said they would most likely be able to keep me for 1 week.
8) Did I mention their accounting arm is even worse? Right now, I'm in a battle with them to repay my signing bonus. I've been sent the wrong total amount, the wrong PIN, the wrong link, the wrong payment amounts, the wrong tax info, etc.
9) The horrible cutthroat culture trickles down and causes staff and seniors to feel like they are stacked against each other. Other teams were rude and arrogant, and long hours are encouraged. People also hoard information and refuse to share, and they will call a slide with 3 useless bullet points "intellectual property" (or IP).
10) Unlimited vacation is a scam, and so are time sheets. We were told not to book vacations while on projects. Meanwhile, there was a time when senior management told us to report our true hours and when we did, they lost their minds realizing that people worked 80 hours per week and they couldn't charge that much to the client.
I came from a big client and left to a big client, and I would never hire EY after my experience. From start to finish, they made the experience miserable and I'm still traumatized. What a way to build a better working world.
