PwC reviews

Some partners makes you regularly want to crawl in a hole and stop existing. Work life balance is a terrible lie and the butt of most jokes. Projects are understaffed or cut in timeline on purpose to boost margin. The system for rating employee performance is ridiculously subjective - you are effectively graded on a curve based on 1. how close you already are to your next milestone and NOT your actual performance 2. literally the whim and mood of whatever leader is rating you with embarrassing volatility - different leaders will rate you wildly differently and vehemently defend their contradictory positions - the system is completely broken and riddled with holes filled instead with baseless and unchecked opinion. Getting perfect snapshot scores doesn’t get you promoted or a top bonus award, while those with lesser scores do, AND those who deserve better scores don’t get them even if you have partners advocating for you if there are more partnery partners in the “good ol’ boys and girls (they at least equally discriminate) club” who have decided you aren’t cut from their cloth. Partners who are mean, vindictive, horrible people are tolerated because they bring in lots of business. The culture clearly values money over well-being at the “regular” partner level. There is no 360 employee review. The hierarchy can destroy you without any repercussion. Your enthusiasm and life will be bled out of you. You desire to try harder means nothing. Prepare to hate your life and sell out for money. Operating several levels above your pay grade means zero. Most directors/managers are burnt out and passive aggressive. Sounds fun, doesn’t it!

PwC has a marketing campaign called “Be Well, Work Well” but it’s more like… “Be well*, work well *as long as being well doesn’t prevent you from working 80 hour weeks, taking 6 AM daily stand ups, and taking on your director’s and partner’s extra work” I was with the firm for 8 years and PwC is a compliance culture - and this translates to management style. At least in the practice I left, there is a very narrow view of what professional growth can and should look like (EPM-heavy, out of the box solutioning). This stifles creative solutioning and the ability to go to market with new service offerings. They’ve been trying to make RPA happen for like 5 years and still can’t figure it out. But like, you’ll make mediocre money? This isn’t a happy place to work. Take the 10k paycut and be happy - they don’t pay you enough for how much they want to control your life.