Where to start?!
Nobody wants to touch you after you work here. Exit opportunities are rare. If you get one, wow you escaped!
The regions is horrible for consulting. Long hours (working into the AM often past sunrise), heavy travel, weekend work, etc. It is all common across the board except for select teams of some consulting firms.
Few things specific to EY-P are:
1) Terrible salary
We worked as long and as hard as any other firm and with the same clients, but we are paid less than half of what the others make. You get no signing bonus. Annual bonus is nothing, if we were paid more and had dignity we'd say keep it. There is no education support they offered a colleague 5K USD for a 2 year commitment. He declined such generosity.
They can only win by giving deep discounts so I guess salaries are hard to cough up. Where the MBB will sell for 2-4 M they will sell for ~0.5-0.8 M.
2) Spineless leaders (including HR):
There was an HR audit. They said no blow-back. Guess what. Whoever went on record got punished. Leaders all play politics. Most are terrible at that too. They default to sucking up and cowering behind "their" partner like puppets. I guess playing proper political games requires brains so shouldn't be shocked at this.
Leadership will never say anything to your face, just backbite about you to others at your rank and around. Example you send deck for review to a senior...next thing you know your colleague at your rank will tell you xyz was complaining about your work to me.
There is no direct genuine feedback. Another example partner gives glowing review on the system. In the round table, he stabs you and points out all your flaws.
Leaders won't stand up to clients. I saw it happen so many times. Client is dumping on the team, partner agrees with client instead of standing up for team. Other times client says I don't want thousands of slides, partner makes team create thousands of slides. Partners often act as EM also. Managers work like Consultants, and Senior Managers and Directors don't work. Only in this team one can get away without having any real skill (or brains).
3) Suck up or shut up culture:
Very few survive that. Maybe 1-2 have. Everyone, literally everyone is trying to leave.
4) Horrible office:
You walk into the office, it is so depressing. Bad blue lighting, blinking tube lights, desks falling apart. Roaches in the coffee machine in the pantry. Kitchen is tiny next to the bathrooms.
Bathrooms smell like urine. (Hence they never interview anyone in office). People are all depressed. You get a head shake, or a nod, or a glance of a hi. Nobody is ever happy to see each other.
5)They only hire from India. So no diversity. They say "we hire the best" and that is crap. There are directors with no graduate degree, majority from Indian B schools or second and third tier EU schools.
The reason they hire from India only is because most of them are bright and work like slaves without asking any question ever. It’s like they are dead in terms of dignity and self-respect and just want to keep working like machines. Worst part is that even they admit they aren't learning anything.
Three people in total are from good schools that you may have heard of. Two of them are from Columbia (One is a partner!), both on the healthcare team (apart from salary the HC team was the happiest). They've had serious issues in the past but seem to be getting their act together. And there's one partner from HBS, but well he's a leader who couldn't care less. Brilliant yes, but 0 EQ. He's former BCG Dubai's head so the only one who knows the work at all. I guess he can be replaced by a robot.
Don't get me wrong, there's tons of people form IIM and ISB, but that's about it. They got lucky with a few IE hires two years ago, following year word got out they got 0. So if you spent a lot of money going to a good school I'd suggest look elsewhere because you will feel you wasted your money, it will add to your depression. They hired a girl from Yale who quit in 6 months and laid off a really smart guy from Oxford because he spoke his mind citing poor performance when he was never put on any project.
Recently they hired few new Partners who are basically rejects from other firms in the region.
Oh yeah they favor white Europeans too much for no reason. So if you are lazy with no brains and good suck-up white male/female, this is your dream team. These people didn't promote a female colleague (non-white) because she worked on an implementation project saying "it's a non-strategy work" but promoted many useless male colleagues working on same "non-strategy" project and they happen to be all whites.
Advice to applicants or those with offers doing research:
Please for the love of your own mental health, family and future career stay away or at least reach out to former employees who have left in the past two years, not current employees. Current employees are too scared to say anything . They know they will get into trouble for saying anything.
Things I can tell you here are that everyone else pays more. EY advisory pays more than EY-P!
There is no fancy lifestyle here at all. You will not be staying in fancy hotels. EY has a city cap system. You usually stay in okay hotels, or crap hotels. Forget the Ritz, its above city cap at its lowest rate. Cost cutting is the name of the game.
Long haul flights are always economy you will never get business class, ever, unless you are partner.
Also you won't be eating fancy meals. You get 200 SAR a day to eat in KSA or 50 USD anywhere else. So a decent meal will cost you over 100 SAR in KSA. Most people eat crap food to save money from the per diem. Health? We work so late unnecessarily that there's no time to gym or life, might as well optimize things.
You will not learn any skills because apart from 2-3 people nobody has any themselves. There's no training. I came in and left with the same weaknesses I went in with. Infact they hired me knowing these skill gaps and in the middle tried to say my performance is bad due to lack of these skills.
You do not work with the brightest because the firm cannot afford the brightest. They hire those who were unlucky and didn't get offers from other firms in India. Some got very close too sadly got duped into the EY-Parthenon brand.
For more technical people one of my friends still says they use 32 bit software as a global organization in this day and age. How can we recommend anything to clients that's advanced and cutting edge when internally we have outdated systems.
In conclusion you get no mentoring, salary or learning consulting should offer here. You leave broken, broke, and depressed. But you leave. And that is a silver lining for everyone still there.
