Work/life balance
It is there if you make it so, by doing the minimum 40-45 hours and turn a blind eye to everything else: fly Sunday night, be home by Thursday evening; it's fine because no-one dings you in reviews for min work anyway
If you want to do more than consulting at client, say for local community or feel like you are part of TW, you have to work in the evenings, come into the office on Fridays, take calls with your local DevOps/Security/Social/Office Events, and yes all that's outside of your client hours thank you very much for your free donations, but good luck using that for a promotion because it's not guaranteed
Performance reviews are largely behind closed doors: despite the work, long hours, good reviews from projects and your co-workers, management still didn't really take those into account and give you a raise or a promotion. You might tolerate it if you are fresh outta college and think you'll do better next time, but this is very insulting and a real tough pill to swallow professionally, when you're there for 7/8 years
Local work efforts have more or less been failing - more people are leaving to join local companies, the work in the office now is no longer interesting
Learning/talent management
No real learning and development if you are not a programmer/tech role, biggest hypocrite aspect in the company
Ad hoc learning is no way to learn or a long term investment for smart people
Rivalry between new roles and groups have made attrition really high, no real career paths
The new global leadership programs are a joke distraction to real learning; just more shiny toys to go travel and meet with each other wasting revenue generated by billable dollars that's already hard to come by
To attract more techies, there are lots of efforts to do technical things like events and initiatives, BUT if you are not a programmer, none of this is really open to you
Not all technologists are considered technologists: they have a nice campaign but it's another shiny toy to get into the junior/associate consultant program; it's not for experienced people, if you are attracted by the culture and the identity then you better be prepared to learn by yourself and find your own career path because you will not get the serious support by your sponsor/mentor/office/management
Vibe
Many senior people leaving, which drops overall experience level by a bunch
Many many data scientist, business, retail, vertical domain experienced folks have left because they don't know what to do to progress or how to staff specialist
No one is telling these 15+ to 20+ year experience principal specialist hires they should learn to work with the rest of TW consultants in an integrated way; they get frustrated by isolated expertise and yet new ideas get rejected by the population, then leave the company which is a waste of $$ and ton of industry experience and waste of time for everyone
Travel is not the hardest thing, but travel will drag all other things down, just remember that
If you're a long-timer, pay will not be comparable to new hires: they will be hired at higher rates than you with similar or less than your TW experience, swallow your pride
Been talking to a lot of long-timers and the same kinds of frustration is reaching boiling point
New people with almost no experience and track record are being favorited as the new faces; market and leadership positions, when they are still finding their way; promote everyone to Lead when they've only got 3-5 years' experience, what a slap in the face for the rest of us, we could not even get to Senior when we had 5 years' exp
You see the revolving door of resume hoarders who will stay for 2 years, then they leave and join other companies with a huge salary hike; you question why you are staying here on below market salaries and same kinds of work
Some people clearly should not be in the company because of work or performance issues, do very little work, cause mayhem to teams on client projects; management does not like to pull the trigger sooner and do the right thing
It's not what you know, it's who you know. Diversity is not applied to everyone unfortunately, gender diversity in entry-level is kinda there (easiest to fix), but when you see senior levels or higher positions it's mostly same circles, people who have been here for 20 years and they basically have all the say and are friends with each other so if you're not in those circles you are pretty much an outsider. Mostly men; women leadership are in management or ops, and not engineering side.
