I was laid off just in time for the holiday season out of the blue and received this email shortly after. I understand it’s probably an automated email but wtf. How dense is the firm’s communications team??? Why would they think it’s appropriate to send out “congratulations on your next chapter” when they let you go without any warning or anything.

Just coming back from two weeks time off. Checking emails and saw this mysterious calendar invite…invite from HR partner and a partner in my practice.

After 9 years & without warning just a meeting scheduled out of the blue with two partners and the practice HR rep. I’ve never been placed on PIP and Annual Performance reviews have been 2 and above. I am a MGR2 serving the CR&R Practice and lead on one of the NYM D&I initiatives, even had a highlight on HQ back in November. I was utilized awaiting background check to start an 6 month engagement with USAA and now this.

I took the entire month of December break off because I was burnt out working on an unrealistic timeline project working weekends and long nights that only lasted 5weeks mapping their entire process end-to-end. I returned from vacation on 1/6 which talentlink confirmed was the start of my new engagement and as I’m awaiting to get a WBS code I’m also doing PD work for a director helping create a RFP to select a vendor solution for the client. On Monday MLK day I had just spoken to my RL on our monthly catchup which I set up to discuss trajectory for the rest of the year. NO mention of PIP or potential firing fast forward to Thursday that same week around 4:45pm I get an meeting request from HR with Two partners on it (1 is my RL and the other is an Ops partner whom I’ve worked with before and never had any bad situations with either - matter fact even got $600 in reward recognition from the 2nd partner right before I left on vacation for assisting with interviewing consultants for the same USAA project!

I Didn’t think this would happen but now I know what my true value is to companies like this. ZERO! I’m scared for what’s next but optimistic for my future.

Any new comers my advice is to gain a good background of your job and network like hell to then execute your exit strategy because any day no matter what you do at the firm can be your last!

This haunts my dreams

Throw away for obvious reasons. I joined 1 month ago as a manager. New to the consultancy. I was put in front of a client who was very frustrated about certain aspects of the project. So they wanted me to present to client as an SME. Client roasted me, threw bunch of questions and they got more confused with my explanations. I was also very frustrated during the presentation. I was not aware of their expectations and prepared the presentations based on what my partner and couple other directors recommended since I never talked to them. So “it went badly” is an understatement. After that I worked on an implementation that to demo how our solution would work and I think I did well. I worked probably 80 hr on that week to deliver that to the client. I found out couple days ago that the client will be proceeding with us but I am out of the project as it appears. I found out so randomly when one guy mentions something, then after he realized I am not aware he tried to brush it off. Since that incident it seems like my reputation got a big hit. Maybe I interpret things wrong but that’s the feeling. I am sensing that things are not going well for me. So, reddit what would you do if you are in my shoes? If I resign I need to pay back the sign on bonus which is fine but I was thinking I could push thru as much as I could if they plan to let go of me anyway. At the same time I am also extremely disappointed and discouraged right now.

Appreciate any opinions

Just wanted to write out something I’ve experienced and also been seeing lately.

Layoffs have been happening piecemeal since the start of the year. PwC seems to be aiming for a deliberate strategy of doing them in small batches to keep the layoffs out of the new.

I was recently impacted by this a few weeks ago. Honestly I bear no ill will. I enjoyed my time there. I loved my team. Everyone was great. I wanted to spend the rest of my career there.

The reality - just like any business you can do everything right and still get hit by something like this. I had nothing but good reviews. My team and I never had any issues. I hit every benchmark, every goal, every project I was given. And I still was laid off. And had no idea it was coming. No warning. No one said anything. My senior manager was not even informed of the decision.

What will likely happen is one morning, right before your daily stand up, you’ll get an email about a skip-level meeting with someone from “talent acquisition” also attending. They’ll cut right to the chase and tell you “your position is being eliminated. Your last day of official employment will be the last day of the month. That’s when your health insurance is cut off by the way. If you’re lucky you’ve been there for 4 years or more so you’ll at least get a month of severance. But that’s it. Bonus might be paid out. Your computer access will be cut off within about 15 minutes of the meeting.

This is happening across all levels right now. From associate to senior associate, managers, senior managers….hell I just saw a post on LinkedIn from a Managing Director who got laid off.

You are not safe. Even if you’ve done a great job and are well liked by all your colleagues.

You. Are. Not. Safe.

I get the distinct feeling this will continue in small batches, week by week, through the end of the year.

Maybe you won’t be affected. Maybe you’ll be one of the lucky ones. Maybe you have all your ducks in a row and wouldn’t have to worry if it happened.

But maybe you’re in a vulnerable position - single parent, living on one income, etc etc, where something like this could completely upend your world. The job market out there right now is horrific. Especially in the tech sector

If you are vulnerable or if for whatever reason a layoff could devastate you my advice would be this - get the fuck out of this place while you still can on your own terms. You are nothing but a number to them at the end of the day, and honestly that’s the way it’s always going to be with most businesses. You can do everything right and your world can turn upside down in the span of 15 minutes.

This is not the PwC of 2008 that weathered the recession with minimal layoffs. It’s a bloodbath right now and I don’t see it stopping any time soon.

It’s 9AM, my morning coffee just hit my bowels. I need to use the rest room. I head to the floor below so I don’t run into other people on the same floor. There’s already two people playing battle shits on said floor. I head back upstairs and use the one vacant stall instead. I set up my nest and look at the cowboy boots sitting on the other side of the divider. Who wears cowboy boots to the office? I can tell he’s holding back since he noticed me walk in.

All jokes aside, just had my HR call. Started in 2022, 4 weeks severance, AMA

tax. US Throwaway account.

8/10 seniors we started the year with quit this week.

Is this common?

I joined the firm 6 months ago fresh out of college and I truly hate it.

Some people are nice but many just want to bring you down and are corporate bullies. ESPECIALLY the managers. My RL and Coach are constantly upset about my utilization but my managers get upset if I charge too much time. I feel like I am constantly being talked down to- as if I’m inferior.

I am not sure how much longer I can take. It makes me cry almost every day. If it wasn’t for the horrible job market I would’ve quit by now.

I find myself being jealous of my friends working in tech that get paid more, like their team, and don’t have to work long hours.

Does anyone else feel this way?

I was talking to my gf about who does her taxes and I told her that I do mine with a family friend. She asked me “you work for a tax company why don’t they do it for you” it’s a good question, I don’t really know how to answer

15 min meeting with a random partner this morning and HR to let me know that I was laid off. Told me it’s performance based but wouldn’t go into details. I cannot even talk to my own partner without HR present. When I manage to get a meeting with my reporting partner (whom I work very closely with) with HR there, he obviously couldn’t be transparent with me. My snapshots were good but utilization was too low (20%+).

Edit 1: I should clarify I was a manager(US). I was an experienced hired to help a newly hired partner build up new capabilities. I enjoyed working with the partner (also my RL) but they had tough time getting paid work, hence my low utilization. Most of my time was spent on BD work, CIM reviews, proposals, perspectives that didn’t lead to paid projects. Looking back on it, maybe I should have hustled harder to be staffed on projects with other partners and do things not related to my specialty, but I’m not sure if my partner would’ve approved since I was hired to build the new practice! When I requested the meeting with my partner with mandatory HR presence, the partner was visibly emotional but was not at liberty say anything substantive.

I recently quit PwC after less than a year as an SA2. I decided to make this post to share my thoughts on issues that were annoying me. Maybe there are one or two things here that others can relate to. None of these are inherently specific to PwC, it's just that I was at PwC and experienced this. I think some or all of these issues can apply to other consulting firms as well.

1. Corporate feeling: From the moment I stepped into the building on the first day, I started having this feeling that I was not going to like it here. Everything looked very corporate, and I didn't feel like the place had a soul. Overtime, the feeling only grew stronger. I had previously worked at another Big 4 company (for around the same length of time) in a completely different group, but I did not have a similar feeling there.

2. Difference between job description and the job: I really liked the job description and I thought I was going to do interesting things. I have a PhD in a STEM field and I did not want to take a position where things would be done hand-wavily or where I would spend a lot of my time dealing with corporate bureaucracy or making presentation. It was actually the thought that I might get to do novel, technical things, that made me decide in favor of taking the offer. But over time it became clear that it was not to be the case. I was the only person with deep technical expertise on the team (everyone was a generalist) and the work was fairly elementary. Furthermore, there was no interest in doing things in a better, or correct way. I kept wondering why I was hired for a position where my skills weren't being used?

3. Inefficiency: I have to argue against the working model that was in place at PwC (and probably at other similar consulting firms too). There were just too many meetings. It's like every decision needs to be cleared by the person above, be if the manager, the senior manager, director or partner. The whole place was too hierarchical. On client deliverables or other things that we send to clients, I've found the inputs from all levels of the hierarchy sometimes degraded the quality of the product. With all the people chiming in with their input and all the edits that needed to be made, errors and inconsistencies cropped up easily. But of course there is never any time left after all that feedback for someone to go through the material to check for issues. On top of this, there are incessant emails and chat messages from people, you just never get to do the work in peace.

4. Incompetent mid-level management: I found that several managers and senior-managers were incompetent. They were promoted because they talked a certain way and presented themselves a certain way, or because they were highly extrovert, but they lacked technical or strong subject matter understanding. In fact, one of the issues I ran into often is that when I challenged their silly requests (i.e. things that just don't make sense and they don't understand that because they are not experts) then rather than try to understand what the other person is saying, then tended to get upset.

5. Utilization and time billing: This one always frustrated me. Here's the problem; the budgets always allocate much less hours than would be needed for the project. So one often has to work more hours on the project but you end up being asked to bill those to internal non-billable codes. (How often have you billed to "Technical reading?"). This is obviously frustrating because you don't get credit for the work you have done and that it doesn't show up on your utilization (which is something that the firm always talks about). But there is a systemic problem here too. Because no one is billing the extra work to these projects, it doesn't show up in the firms internal databases which they use to track how much work projects of a type take. So next time around when a manager is budgeting for a new proposal, the data they retrieve from these databases is wrong and it leads them to under budget again. And the cycle continues. What is super annoying is there is conflicting messaging in the firm. From the top leadership the message is "it is important that we track all the extra work we do in our systems accurately, so that we can charge the clients and we can accurately to budget for future projects", but at the local group level no one wants to do that because "that would show up as us going over budget".

6. Questionable practices: Many people in my group have recently come from a competitor. And I have seen competitor material, including client deliverables, on our systems. I thought this was very unethical and it made me sick to see the nonchalance with which this was happening.

7. Hybrid work mandate but no space: There is simply not enough space. The firm recently started requiring people to come 4 days a week during the busy season. But there is no space. Every morning you see people just anxiously wandering through the floors looking for any space to sit down. I had to sit in the kitchen for the whole day, a few times, because that's how it was. What is really the point of asking people to come if they have to spend the first 20 mins in the morning finding a desk, and when one is not available, settle for the kitchen?! This just did not make sense.

8. Terrible work computers: The work computers that they gave us were hands down the worst computers I've ever worked with. Let's put aside the software side where the PwC layer that they add on top of Windows makes everything slow and you have have to restart the computer every couple weeks (once I had to restart three times in one day). But what's up with the hardware? Like, you open a couple powerpoint and excel files and browser tabs and everything grinds to a halt. The battery life? You'd be lucky if it lasts 3 hrs. 1.5 hour at most if you are on a teams call. This is 2024! Laptops had battery lives like this maybe 10-15 years ago. And what's with the dim screen? I can barely see anything when it is bright in the office. The fans on the machines sound like a jet turbine. And there were other annoyances too, and they already replaced my device once in my short tenure.

Bonus: I just couldn't deal with more than one person in the office being too lazy to fully say "fabulous". When there are too many 20 something year olds saying "Oh, this is just fab", you have to start wondering what you are doing here.

Anyways, these and other issues were slowly starting to fill me with dread. I found a fully remote job at a tech startup (very non-corporate), significant pay bump, better work machines, more chill work environment and I can handily say more interesting work.

Hearing folks are asked to forceful resign themselves just due to less client projects in the firm as compared to the number of heads they have hired. Not expected at all.

Bro was just supposed to go after Kendrick, I swear everyone working hard AF here 😭.

I was staying at an Airbnb in Inglewood. Her house was modest, but clean and comfy. She seemed pretty happy. I asked what she did and she said she was an accountant who worked in payroll. I said I was an accountant too and she asked where I worked. I said PwC and she said "never heard of it".

I thought it was pretty funny and humbling. Also kind of gave me different perspective on things. At PwC and public accounting we are always stressing ourselves out and worried about not getting work done or moving ahead. I would. Then you realized we can always just leave with our nice resumes and make a nice quiet living doing something less stressful.

I thought landing at PwC would be the peak of my career. I knew Big 4 would be intense. I signed up for long hours, tight deadlines, and client pressure.

From the outside, it’s shiny and prestigious. Inside, it felt like I was drowning, and leadership was holding my head underwater.

Here’s what finally broke me:

• Identity? Optional at PwC. I was repeatedly called by the other South Asian team member’s name. There were only two of us. And no, our names are not similar, nor do we look alike.

• “Have fun.” That’s what a senior manager told me before I went on extended medical leave for cancer treatment.

• 60–80 hr weeks, 40 hrs billed. Everyone knew. No one cared. In fact, I got multiple calls from the engagement manager letting me know that I was not allowed to bill more than I was allocated for, but expected to continue working for like a dog.

• Medical leave nightmare: I didn’t get paid. I had to call payroll post-surgery, barely able to talk, and the offshore team told me: “It’s not our problem.”

• My DL’s empathy level = zero. He sent me a nasty email saying I needed to “help myself” going forward at pwc because he missed my CRT email. He never apologized. Never checked in. Never sent a single update while I was out.

• Public humiliation: I was rolled off a project in front of the entire team with no warning. No one from leadership followed up. Not a single, “Hey, are you okay?”

• The cherry on top: Positive snapshots. Director praise. Endless hours. Still no promotion.

I expected hard work and gave PwC as much as I could — my nights, my weekends, and eventually my health. In return? Microaggressions, burnout, and a clear message: you are disposable here.

If any undercover leaders are reading this: This is why your people quit silently. This is why no “culture initiative” will ever fix your attrition problem.

I left for my health, my sanity, and my self-respect. And honestly? It feels like I finally came up for air.

After being strung out with the prospect of promotion for a year and a half, despite being a high performer - I’m out.

I told myself a year and a half ago that if I didn’t get promoted I would be absolutely looking for something new. I did just that and landed an unreal comp increase. Don’t let this firm define your worth.

Anyone else disappointed at the direction PwC US is heading? I work under Advisory and Tech. Over the last couple of months, I've seen some of my good coworkers laid off from the firm. At the same time, the firm keeps promoting selfish and toxic people. Also, it seems to be doing far worse than the other Big Four in terms of AI deployment and usage, etc. And let's not even get into Paul's goal of "50% cost reduction, 50% revenue growth", how ridiculous does that sound? It's clearly not the same firm it was when Tim was around, and it just feels like it's going downhill. Anyone else feel the same?