KPMG reviews

Unfortunately tough times have led to: multiple rounds of layoffs within IT, bonuses are non-existent and salary raises are rumored to be frozen. Flexible work options like working from home 1 day a week have been cancelled. All training was cancelled and no one is allowed to take any training courses. Departmental and team meeting budgets were eliminated - so no teambuilding activities or even lunches anymore. Smaller perks like the annual Thanksgiving turkey give-a-way and summertime ice cream giveaway were eliminated. Morale is awful and rumors of continued layoffs in Jan or Feb of 2010 will likely keep employees on edge. Aside from the current economic climate and effects on KPMG, the overall IT climate is focused on outsourcing US jobs as a strategic initiative. Frequent re-organizations have led to overall slowdowns in any tactical or strategic projects, as well as focus management more on empire building/saving. All in all, I would advise prospective employees to wait 2+ years for things to settle down and for business to get better, hopefully leading to a return to a normal business climate internally at KPMG as well as to more material rewards i.e bonuses and perks.

Prepare to have no life outside of work. Never in my life could I have ever imagined working this much. You work on weekends, sometimes 7 days a week, often times without charging the time or getting recognized for putting in the effort to meet unreasonable budget and time deadlines that your managers will never commend you on. Prepare for 40-55 hr work weeks during summer and 80-100+ hr work weeks from September-April. Your clients will never be pleased to see you, no matter how good you are, and they will in fact make that known to you at all times. Some are often very difficult to work with or get the right information from. On top of everything, the salaries they are offering are much lower than the mid tier firms for some unknown reason and when you calculate the number of hours you put in compared to your pay you might be making somewhere near $12/hr while they charge the client $350/hr for your services. They give you 25 days PTO but implemented 7 days of mandatory PTO, further reducing your paid vacation/sick time to about 18 days. Its not uncommon to get bad performance reviews for taking PTO at times that are not advantageous to the firm. For example, if you book a vacation a year in advance and due to client push back the engagement doesn't finish on time but you leave for vacation, that will negatively be frowned upon no matter how out of your hands the situation may be.