--Federal positions are mostly staff augmentation even though the firm claims to provide "strategic consulting." To make matters worse, the firm doesn't even provide high-quality staff aug and instead stuffs projects full of overqualified practitioners and has them do work one or two levels below their skill level (i.e. note-taking, aligning text in power point slides, performing basic excel functions, etc.)
--Stiff, hierarchical culture
--Career progression depends more on participation in largely meaningless "firm activities" rather than executing high-quality client work
--Most federal practitioners are capped at 40 hours per week, which sounds good until you find out that many people "ghost" hours to keep up with work demands while not exceeding their cap, and add in some bs firm activities and you can be working 50-60 hrs per week performing rote and unrewarding tasks
--Morale is low. Most people in Federal are somewhere between bored and miserable, but the pressure to pretend to find the work meaningful and enjoyable is high and serious ass-kissing is required to advance, which makes for a strange dynamic in which unhappy people plaster smiles on their faces and compete to paint a rosy picture of their grossly exaggerated contributions to the firm and its clients
--Federal clients don't use Deloitte effectively, which isn't necessarily the firm's fault, but it makes the firm an accomplice in wasting taxpayer money
--Deloitte has an inferiority complex vis a vis MBB, Federal has a major inferiority complex vis a vis commercial, and human capital has the same re: S&O and tech, which make Deloitte Federal Human Capital an especially unpleasant place to be
--For all of the reasons above, high-performers have and continue to leave the firm in droves
