EY reviews

- management only cares about numbers and showed complete disregard to employees well being and work-life balance - management was very controlling and conniving. Basically they made us feel like we had to work weekends when our contracts are not written that way - pay is under industry average, they need to do this to keep their prices low - managers understand that many analysts are coming in here as their first job and take advantage of people’s good nature to squeeze their output out for all their worth -first I had mental burnout -second I had physical burnout -third I had emotional burnout - fourth I had an even deeper physical burnout And MANAGEMENT DID NOT CARE. They just pushed for more cases - the stress of my engagement sent one of my coworkers to the hospital. The partner on the project buried his head in the sand and didn’t think of not care for his analysts criticisms about the project - the senior manager pretended that he was sympathetic to the analysts but in actuality used our feelings to try to get us to work even longer hours - senior manager literally told us that we were going to maximize time on laptops over the next 2 weekends, even if we finished our work, we had to check in with the manager before logging off, again, ON THE WEEKEND, to see if the manager could find more work for us to do in order to maximize production -the intensity of my engagement created an “every man for himself” culture of spying and manipulating for the individual’s benefit. The more you assisted the managers to the detriment of your fellow analysts (who, for example, wanted to voice their frustrations with the project amongst another) to the benefit of the management -management would not hear analyst criticisms and feedback of being overworked. They just kept on asking for longer hours and more production -this job caused me panic attacks After I quit this job, the sheer stress on my body and mind capitulated. I was mostly in bed for 3 weeks because that’s how long it took me to recover and feel like a person again. -management is so used to dealing with burnt out college grads it’s their job to try to calm them down and keep trained analysts from leaving, and then promptly pushing analysts to overwork themselves again

Managers are essentially salesmen - they care about nothing else than guaranteeing they'll keep the client. They will work you to the ground. Often rude and downright abusive, they have no real expertise in anything other than selling last years' (read: last decade's) tech solutions to clients that can't tell a computer from a TV remote. Managers on IT projects also act as PMs (Project Managers) and often have never had real IT development experience. You can see how well that can work out: they usually have no idea how to prioritise staff, tasks or solutions. Their idea of PM is just sticking to deadlines agreed in advance with the client: when the client fails to deliver on the obligations on their side, somehow this never affects deadlines. Nor do other impediments - they've never even heard the word, and they run IT projects. They will always hide technical risks from the client and pretend they're not there or that everything is always going fine. Supposedly, the client is expecting experts to deliver their projects but often teams are just novices, straight out of university, that have never worked in IT professionally and haven't got the faintest idea of how to carry out an IT project. Of course, the quality of the solutions is often abysmal but who cares? There's never any internal reviewing and the clients don't have the time, don't know any better or simply don't care either. You cannot expect any serious training from anyone - bar exceptions - though they do offer online training subscriptions, which are handy, if you ever manage to find the time at the end of a 10 hour workday. They will use coercive tactics and psychological pressure to make you work overtime but will almost never pay you for it. They will try to avoid at all costs to pay you overtime or week ends. Project delivery always trumps holidays so you can expect to take time off only when it suits them e.g. in between projects. They have a system to log your project hours by which your progress is monitored - only that you can only enter the number of hours you managers tell you to, often in unrelated project codes. Often they'll ask you to enter fewer hours than you have actually worked. Oh, and if you're not on a project, you enter zero hours so your progression is of course hampered. This happens more often than you'd think. They insist on working on client site just to maintain a constant presence at their client's premises since the client does not know any better and will assume that since you're there, you're delivering. This is the good case. The bad case is the client will want to meddle and have various opinions on IT matters even when they've hired you as the expert (supposedly). Often, the client site is simply appalling: noisy, dirty, you'll work in run down buildings that haven't been renovated in 20 odd years with ancient hardware (15 inch monitor anyone? PCs with windows XP? in the 21st century? yes, really). Some clients have not enforced the anti-smoking laws: you'll often see people smoking on the premises - including your managers! IT work is often on legacy systems: you'll learn nothing of substance if stuck in one of those projects! Performance appraisals take place in an non transparent way: you'll find out your appraisal but there's no way to get your point of view across. Your supervisors' appraisal is never disputed and higher management doesn't know any better nor do they care to know any better. Don't count on your colleagues to support you or help you: they're often after the same promotion and they'll do their best to undermine you and promote their interests at your expense! They will hide information from you that you need to carry out the project, they will meet the client behind your back without telling you, they will blame you for anything that goes wrong to your superiors at every opportunity. It's a poisonous environment to work in.