1. No work-life balance. They will stress how important their people are during the recruiting/interview phase, and will talk your ears off about flexibility in work arrangements, 4-day travel plans for employees who travel to client-site, reasonable work hours, family values, etc. None of that exists. Most people I know had to forfeit weeks' worth of vacation hours because they were not allowed to take time off from engagements. I have had to work on paid firm/national holidays because the project teams are all led by workaholics. I am basically on call 24 hours a day, 7 days a week. I have received phone calls on Saturday mornings at 7 am and Sunday evenings at 7 pm asking me for urgent turnaround on requests that are not in fact urgent or even project-related. There is no sense of personal space - the senior leadership basically acts as if they own us. I was told my average work week would be 45 hours per week, perhaps upwards of 50-55 on extremely high-pressured client engagements during the final delivery stages. I average 52 hours per week on a normal week, and have worked upwards of 76-80 hours per week multiple weeks in a row when we were not in a delivery stage.
2. Benefits package is weak: poor health care coverage if you live outside the New York City area and very high premiums to pay, as well as really poor retirement savings plan (the firm really doesn't contribute very much to your retirement savings or do much in terms of contribution matching like other firms do)
3. The people culture does not seem to resonate with those at the Partner/Principal/Executive level. They are very hands-on in terms of daily project management, are frequently micro-managers, and do not have an understanding of work-life balance.
4. Technology is in the stone ages: you have no access to your office number unless you are sitting in an EY office. Advisory professionals are rarely in an EY office, as we are usually working on client-site 95% of the time. So you have no way of connecting with people who use your office phone. None of the firm's sites or applications are available remotely, except for a very rudimentary version of the email program on EY-secured mobile devices. This means if you go on a vacation for more than a week, you have to take your work computer with you to enter your time, as there is no remote access to time reporting. Another way to tether employees 100% of the time to the firm.
