Booz Allen Hamilton – “Not a good place to work”

Pros

Their pay is competitive, their name may look good on your resume, if you are lucky you may work on a project that benefits you or is in your field of interest.

Cons

BAH is not a great place to work, at least not anymore, don't be fooled by the Fortune rankings where BAH is voted a great company to work for, it's bull, an executive even commented once during a networking event that she had never known or heard of anyone who participated in Fortune's ranking surveys, and she's been around a few years. This is probably because BAH handpicks who their reviewers are. Their hiring process is also very dishonest, they lure you with potential work in exciting areas in your field and even verbally offer you perks, but when you join, they throw you into any project (even in work completely unrelated to your field and with zero benefit to your career) where your manager can offload you and get billable hours for the cost center, and the verbal perks, well you trusted the company, and rightly so, so when you complain, you have nothing in writing and how can you fight with your new employer? all you can do is humbly walk away. If they promise/negotiate perks ask for it in writing, you'll see how quickly they rescind the offer. I also think this company is on the decline, going public will destroy their employee and work/life balance first mantra. As we speak they are now aligning themselves to go public and then they will be just another heartless grinding consulting firm. If you just want a job and don't really care about your career, then work here, but otherwise, you are better served working in a more focused company. I put my best foot forward when I was recruited (while gainfully employed somewhere else) and they basically screwed me with(out) perks and the type of work, don't work here, you'll be disappointed. About them going public, well yes, the Carlyle group, a greedy private equity group famous for buying and selling businesses. They bought BAH from the partners, or will pay them when they take BAH public and Carlyle cashes out as well, but their plan may not work out, in this market, they may not get top dollar for the public offerring, thereby ending up with the same amount of money they paid for it. Honestly there have been little changes and added value brought upon by Carlylye besides tightening up utilization of employees (and lowering morale) (which forces managers to make their employees do work unrelated and unbeneficial to the employee) and renaming their practice capabilities, renaming executive titles so they are easier to relate to for external parties, and creating new employee levels to again, better align with public competitors and possibly to halt promotions to keep salary costs under control until the IPO (these extra employee levels also did wonders to the morale of employees, now they have three more levels to get by to make partner, making total levels at around 10, almost impossible to attain at this point). BAH sold me and continues to sell the image of a company that cares, that is different, but in the end, it is just another corporation who only cares about the bottom line, their partners sold out to Carlyle, they cashed out and threw the 100 year old mantra out the window. If you come here, don't expect the world, expect to work hard and on unrelated work to your field, and you'll be happy. Once more, I have not seen any value creation by Carlyle, therefore a higher ipo price than what they paid for is probably not possible, they are probably just trying to liquidate BAH at this point and free up their cash (recognizing the bad deal they got themselves into and as they recognize that they are stuck in a sideways market for years to come). Investors will see the lack of value created and will not pay more per share than the company is worth, no winners here, everybody loses, employees, partners and investors, all for a quick greedy buck...

Advice to Senior Management

Do not go public, do not force managers to place people in unrelated projects to their fields or interests, go back to what BAH great, people and employees first, dollars and cents second (or ipo share price in this case)