Pros
The previous posts all highlight the great things about SEI (how awesome of a place it is, ownership, etc.), but those views are very skewed by the consultants who have drank the cool-aid. This post is not that. It is about the true inter workings of SEI - some great and some not so great. Pros: - Great work/life balance. This is probably one of the main reasons why people stay at this firm. You work a 9-5 gig with minimal stress and get paid like a Director+ in industry. You do have to play the game in getting involved, but if you are smart, that only takes 1-2 hours a month. And when you get promoted, you don't even need to do that. Just show up once a while and enjoy the free food/drinks. - The pay is great, especially if you calculate pay vs. effort/hours worked. Most of the work we do is pretty standard low to mid level type of work, not rocket science (as much as SEI want you to believe), so 9-5 more than suffice a lot of times. But the pay for it is phenomenal. I worked a lot more and got paid less (although the work was much more interesting) in the past. - The people at SEI are decent and generally friendly (at least on the surface). The structure does not require consultants to compete to get promoted, you just have to get your points through different activities (it is more subjective than the firm like to admit) and you are good. I have been through a lot worse on the people part.
Cons
Ok, so no one at the firm will like the below and the topics will probably get deflected during the interview process. But this is how the firm really operates. Cons: - We do some consulting work, but a good percentage of our work is staff augmentation. SEI will have you believe otherwise, but it is true. Instead of pitching for more strategic-orientated engagements, we go for staff aug type positions just so we can stay somewhere forever or stay "sticky". You know who else is sticky? Milton from Office Space. We are too afraid to play with stronger competitors and ask for tougher engagements. Nothing wrong with that, but let's be honest to candidates and market ourselves as such. Heck, there might be a market for that, a premium staff aug firm. But we would never know since we don't do any analysis, which brings me to my next point.... - Lack of strategic direction - on everything. During the interview, you should ask these questions: What is your projected growth rate and why? What are the strengths, weaknesses, opportunities, and threats SEI is facing? What about your clients? Most of them will not be able to answer these questions intelligently. Why? Because we do not do any analysis on ANYTHING and therefore no idea on where we are heading. Instead, we make assumptions.....outrageous assumptions. - Management's myopic view - on everything. I can write an essay on this unfortunately. We don't make investments for long term sustainability, everything is all about the short term. - Current business development process is broken. I get it, one of the sell for SEI is that consultants get to have a say in the business development process which is great. But if the firm did any kind of analysis, we would see that the ROI on what we have been doing so far could be much higher vs. other potential framework. Why don't we host a networking event or speaking panel? And why do we keep having the same people doing business development when we are not even sure if they are good at it? - Don't buy into the stock ownership hype. During the interview process, everyone is going to sell you on owning part of the company and being a true owner. But you have to keep a lot of things in perspective. You have to buy the stock and the dividends are before tax - this is really no different than buying Apple or Facebook stocks. At least there is a liquid market for those..... - Management does not think about ROI. I won't go into the specifics, but there are a lot of internal processes/tasks that we can easily be outsourced to interns, etc. that will free up management's time to do management type of work (network with CEOs, sit on a speaking panel, think about strategic direction of the firm, etc.). Resource and effort optimization needs to be improved. - Our marketing efforts are substandard. Enough said.