Accenture Reviews in San Francisco, CA Area

Pros

* Overplayed but true - work with the best and brightest
* Ever growing opportunities for career change and work/life balance
* Ability for the Accenture ship to change fast and often

Cons

- compensation below market ( I don't see that changing unfortunately any time soon)
- the prfm management could still use improvement

Advice to Senior Management

* Keep up the good work with communicating early and often
* Take ability to change to the next level - accelerate and adjust to changing market sooner - salary and offerings wise

Pros

-Great benefits
-Opportunity to travel great for young grads
-Opportunity to gain exposure to different industries and roles
-Learn important soft skills
-Smart, interesting people

Cons

-Some people are placed on projects requiring long hours and a long cross country commute
-Accenture assumes that work is your priority.
-Your experience largely depends on luck.
-There is a large element of luck in promotions.

Advice to Senior Management

US employees should have the same amount of vacation time as those in Europe, and the US should implement the European Accenture policy of employees earning an hour of vacation time for every hour of overtime worked.

Pros

Good contacts, makes you look good in the future

Cons

they work you hard and dont pay so much while putting it upon you to train yourself.

Advice to Senior Management

train better.

Pros

postive place to work at

Cons

hierarchy organization but you get uised to it

Advice to Senior Management

none to provide

Pros

Name recognition
Business connections
Reasonable salary
Always had projects available and billable opportunities, not much direction from management but found engagements close to home

Cons

Too many layers of management and most decisions are based on persoanl connections instead of business. A lot of back room dealings to get work assigned.

Advice to Senior Management

Stop playing games and be up front about the business opportunities. Less politics and more standard business practices. More oversight and career direction would help entry level consultants.

Pros

Respect for work life balance: stretches of long days are offset by comp days, easy to request and get vacation days off. Company encourages good balance.

Cons

Once you've completed a project in a specific area, it's easy to be labeled an 'expert' in that field and difficult to move on to other type of projects.

Advice to Senior Management

Allow analysts the opportunity to try various types of projects before they are placed in one practice. This would help best identify their strengths.

Pros

If you're in the consulting workforce, you'll most likely never see the inside of an Accenture office, but instead be working at client sites, which could be almost anywhere. Not a bad scenario for fresh college grads who have no life yet and could use a housing and food budget subsidy. You might get sent to India for an outsourcing project, which could also be interesting.

Cons

Incredibly boring work for software developers. Compensation is below industry average. Very little training budget. If you're in software development, be prepared to use dusty and obsolete methodologies. Java is the new COBOL! Company does not value higher education. Leadership are all born-and-bred Accenture, most of them having arrived as analysts right after college. Accenture is well on their way to becoming an outsourcing juggernaut, so if you are disturbed by the idea that a 'high performance business' is one that sends every possible job to the third world, you might feel a little out of place.

Advice to Senior Management

Take responsibility for your own actions. All too often I see rank and file analysts and consultants bearing the brunt of bad decisions made by short-sighted managers who have little understanding of software development or company policies.

Pros

Great place start a career - you have the opportunity to learn valuable technical or functional skills
it's a cliche, but the people really are good - the recruiting process does a nice job of finding bright and fun loving personalities across a diverse cultural spectrum.
The idea of weekly travel to new places, international assignments, racking up hotel and airline points for free vacations is very alluring - - especially coming right out of college

Cons

It's difficult to build deep skills - you're at the mercy of what is selling at any particular point in time. You'll probably have to switch up and pretend to know more than you do in order get / stay staffed.
We are infatuated with offshoring everything possible, but this comes with a price. Since we offshore the bottom levels of the work pyramid, there are limited opportunities for new US based resources in meaty project work ( unless you count PPT jockey or PMO helper) The result is we are bringing up a "generation" of IT consultants who don't understand how things really work.
The work life balance is terrible compared to the rewards and stress of the job.
Eventually, you'll have to go - - you'll burn out or won't make one of the cuts (up or out)...or even if you've made the cut to SE, there's no guarantees. This isn't a place to linger - put together a plan - execute it, then punch out while the gettin's good.

Advice to Senior Management

More than any other professional services company, we seem to have an issue with managing client expectations, which is a key contributor to all the crazy hours. I used to think this was just part of the consulting profession. However, after some very specfic comparisons with good friends at other firms, it's much more of a problem here.

Pros

- Will learn more than your peers at any other company if you get the right roles and change clients every 12-18 months
- Extensive access to training and information (e.g., Gartner reports, internal reports, example deliverables and assets from past engagements and research)
- Motivated "make it happen" colleagues

Cons

- Long hours and singular focus on work/client
- Tremendous resource growth has caused significant degradation in the caliber of people
- Lost focus on delivering the "guarantee". Originally the idea was a client paid for higher priced consultants, but knew if they pulled Accenture in to do the job it would get done. Now the prices have eroded and much of the work commoditized to almost eliminate that buyer value

Advice to Senior Management

1.) Clean house...make sweeping changes at the Partner level to remove non contributing resources
2.) Require deeper engineering skills (return to the days of investing in deep technology training) (applicable mostly to consulting workforce)

Pros

Interesting work
Great training
Career counseling

Cons

When it comes to rating/promotion you only as good as your last project

Advice to Senior Management

.