- No matter how much management talks about it, work-life balance is very difficult to obtain because of the nature of the work / industry.
- You basically have to sacrifice many aspects of your personal life to succeed. There are many demands from people outside of client work. It's pretty unrealistic to obtain. Especially as you go higher up in the ranks.
- Management doesn't stand up to clients to draw boundaries and stop clients from making incredibly unreasonable demands about deadlines
- Revenue is directly correlated with how many hours people work, so there's minimal incentive for leadership to implement more efficient ways to do things, leading technology, etc.
- Exceptional people are told they are ordinary. Underperforming people are passed along as meeting expectations and then they become someone else's problem.
- Most people are burnt out and don't have the time or capacity to properly coach others. The business model of revenue being tied with billable hours doesn't allow for proper on the job coaching or people development. All of these hours are eaten. And then it looks like you're working a lot less than everyone else.
- Many partners and senior managers develop toxic traits due to the nature of the industry (workload is far too high, work is handed to people that are not trained well enough, client deadlines are unreasonable and partners are forced to accept them or else they'll lose the business, etc.). Toxic traits developed include chewing people out for mistakes, not coaching properly, not learning how to communicate effectively, making people feel bad about themselves when they don't know something, taking anger out on the team, etc.
- Partners effectively tell people to eat hours without explicitly saying it. They tell people to do tons of client work that's not billable. This makes people burnt out.
- Certain minorities are not treated equally. Sadly, the imbalance of treatment also comes from other minorities. Both racial and gender bias is pervasive.
