Baringa Partners Reviews

- Senior management coerce you into cultish behaviours. Corporate bullying is rife. If you don't play along, they will get back at you. The CEO is the main driver of these behaviours. However, he is great at maintaining his image and getting other people to put his cultish ideals into practice! - The German, US and Australian offices have been performing poorly and sucking up our bonuses. This is extremely demoralizing. UK staff work hard and we suffer for poor performance in other locations. - There are many partners who have not sold a single project and have been here for years. They are around only because of the “close-knit old mens’ clique”. They tell you that they take diversity seriously, but the reality is very disturbing! They have put a few mascots here and there to cover their tracks. - The partners force employees into aggressive marketing tactics. The global head of financial services asks new employees to open up their Linkedin profiles and introduce him to their contacts. I haven’t worked in another consultancy before, so can’t comment if this is common practice. It certainly felt very awkward! - The marketing tactics on Linkedin actually hurt the company. As a client once said, “Your activity on Linkedin should get alarm bells ringing!” They get low-end publishers to put out deceptive stats and then aggressively market them on Linkedin! - At corporate events, staff and their partners are allotted shared accommodation with other families to save money. Employees have been brainwashed to the point that they defend it saying it is a good way to “network”. Almost all staff use Easyjet or Ryanair for corporate travel - The company events are straight out of a sitcom. At dinner, employees are asked to rise and their significant others to “take a moment to appreciate the effort of their partners”. It is so corny! If you want to build a cult, at least TRY to be subtle about it. - The CEO walks down the aisle in black-tie attire alongside a lady in a shiny gown for the awards ceremony. The environment reeks of a “pretentious wannabe upper-class” group. My friends couldn’t stop laughing when I showed them a video I took. - The partners keep boasting about winning the “Best Workplace award”. The process is rigged. Individuals are hand-picked to provide feedback with no anonymity. They also spend considerable effort in preparing the submission just to get the award. And a lot more telling everyone about it. - The knowledge and skills in the company are pathetic. This is unlikely to get better as they continue to recruit people who are like them. People who can write two lines of code are forced to label themselves “ethical hackers”. The worst part is partners don’t realize how foolish they look in doing these things.

After a few months I found I was struggling with work load. I spoke to peers and seniors, and, while they were sympathetic, they made it clear that this was just the way it was at baringa. I observed colleagues taking time out for mini burn outs very frequently in my first year. I persuaded myself this is just the price of working in an interesting consultancy, and sacrificed my home life to keep doing the job - no evening activities, no meeting friends in the week, etc. I then was told about how much the Partners at baringa earn - it's ridiculous. Loads of them on more than £1m, with responsibility for about 50 staff or fewer. I now realise the business model - the Partners extract as much as they can, saying yes to all client work and letting staff do brutal hours to deliver this. Staff wage rates have barely increased in a decade, but Partner pay has ballooned. The worst thing about it all is that the partners genuinely believe they are "nice guys" just because they are not as bad as Jeff besoz or whoever. They think they are in the right morally, which gives them the cover to pocket these crazy sums. In the end I realised the conditions would never change, because the leadership doesn't want change. So I left for an investment bank - where I have better pay and lower hours.