- Deeply disruptive culture, and very poorly integrated with the rest of PwC. There is a clear pecking order in the company: if you're at the firm, you implicitly look down on PwC management consulting. If you're PwC MC, you look down on PwC tech consulting, and so it goes.
- Senior management is snobbish, arrogant, and smug towards younger employees
- Exit opportunities are ridiculously different than MBB. Don't ever let anyone talk you into believing that it (or Deloitte and other firms) is close to MBB. It is not.
- The company is massively understaffed (because - surprise! - the right talent is running away). The result is that everyone is overworked and, more often than not, admittedly unhappy.
- The work that you do is not truly interesting, and you're typically just told by your managers to create a BS narrative that is compelling enough for your clients to fall for - even though everybody in your team knows it's false. The objective is to sell more work, not to do good work. I cannot overstate this enough.
- Company culture is not welcoming of people leaving after a few years to pursue different opportunities. While MBB encourages you to do that, at the firm, there are no programs to support you in your journey, and bringing up any such interest is very poorly looked at.
- The firm is constantly trying to cut costs, and even though it likes to brand itself as "tech-savvy," the reality is that the tools and equipments that you use can barely operate Microsoft Excel.
- The alumni network is very weak and, while working at Strategy&, you will have little to no opportunities and time to expand your work outside of the firm.
- "Hustle porn" is encouraged and rewarded. Most of what you do is showing that you're working hard, rather than doing great work. That means that you will work late at the office (rather than remote), over the weekends, and so on - even though, a lot of times, the work you do will be wasted and never make it to the client (more often than not, you can tell that will happen before you start the task).
- Many of the partners and senior management I've met are either still single or divorced. Although they might not say, you can very much tell that their work has completely disrupted the rest of their lives. Most of them seem okay with that.
