Utilization is a horrible system that is common in many consulting firms. Don't be fooled by the unlimited PTO and the boasting of shutting down the company during the holiday season. The utilization rates are very high and does not take into account vacations. Last year, I did not take any vacation. I had to take off the required days for the holiday season and I ended up having to work 10 hours everyday until May to meet my utilization. If the firm is going to close down, then don't hold it against the employees. What's worse is the employee does not have control over their utilization. If they are benched for some reason, it is almost impossible to catch up after a certain time. If an employee is on a contract where they can only bill 8 hours max, then they can never take off any days because they can't make those hours up.
Another issue I had was that GT expected everyone to do extra work on top of their client work. This business development work does not count toward your utilization. A lot of people are workaholics and I simply am not. I received emails during holiday weekends and I was expected to do business development work.
There are many other things that bothered me about the company. The fact that I have to pay to park at the firm is crazy. I was at the client site most of the time so I had to use public transit to move around. It added up to a lot just to get to work and back. I paid for parking at the metro, paid for the metro and had to pay when I drove to the GT building for anything.
Many people seemed delusional about what work/life balance really is. I've heard people say they have multiple nannies to take care of their children because they work 7 days a week. I've heard people spending their family vacations in the hotel rooms taking calls. I've heard people boast that they leave at 5PM everyday and have dinner with their families, just so they can work until midnight and wake up at 4-5AM to do more work. I tried very hard to make sure I had work/life balance but people seemed to be disrespectful of my time. I've had managers knowingly call me on my anniversary weekend getaway to see if I could skip some scheduled events to work on a proposal. I had managers ask me to participate in business development calls on Saturdays and Sundays. I've had people call me after I left work to assign me business development work without consideration of whatever plans I had that evening. Working at GT means being "on call" 24/7.
The final straw for me, personally, was the year-end review process. It was very time consuming. I received many positive reviews and was told I was highly valued and highly regarded in the company. Employees were receiving many emails about our record-breaking revenue. Yet, my pay increase and bonus was minuscule. Several co-workers and I thought it was a typo. I definitely did not feel appreciated after that.
