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Hello folks,
Looking for some honest advice. Considering an offer with SocGen B’lore for Specialist Software Engineer position with 5.5 years exp and into Tech service management. Could you please tell me a bit about following points?
- 25% of the compensation(5Lakhs) is Variable. Does company even pay 60% of it at the end of the year if you perform say 4/5 rating?
- What is an average annual hike that the firm gives?
- How is the work culture and LGBTQ inclusionpolicy? Société Générale
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I’ve worked for both. Comp is not comparable unless you’re looking at PDMs. BAH external offers are decent but largely cash. For reference my first bonus as a SC at Deloitte was more than all of my bonuses at BAH in 4.5 years combined. BAH has a great culture if you’re more mission oriented or are a veteran. Exit opportunities are drastically different as well. BAH exitS have to be tied to federal, sure you can get into big tech but has to be in their federal practice. I truly liked both firms, but at its core BAH is more of a federal contractor and Deloitte is a consultancy that has a federal practice, but is only a fraction of the firm writ large
Bah5, yeah that model makes sense. At Deloitte they nominally have the same thing, but it comes with a ton of baggage and condescension, where you get shunted to the non partner track with worse benefits and pay.
Not that people shouldn't get paid more for doing more, but you'll naturally be more productive if you're doing what you specialize in. Deloitte is slowly coming around to this with increasing dedicated proposal writers on staff, but that's still the exception I think. Of course there's benefit to people doing client work providing input on proposals, but i just think D is way below that optimal balance.
More generally, I think many American workplaces are profoundly inefficient because of 'exempt employee's status - there's zero cost to making them work more, upfront anyway, so firms don't hesitate to spend their time badly. When you pay people hourly or have a strong convention of capping hours (eg at 40) like many gov contractors do, a lot of that nonsense disappears. Most of these firm initiatives would evaporate if D had to pay an hourly rate for them.
Also, D has some terrific benefits but you may not ever use or be eligible for them - sabbatical, full ride for grad school, long parental leave, et al. So if you're not ever using them, that's another cost advantage to BAH. D used to have tons of socializing which cost $, but some 80-90% of that has been erased by the pandemic and isn't coming back to anything close to it's prior level, given the cost savings they've seen and prefer.
All in all, I just find it curious that the outside environment for both is the same, but the WLB varies so much after controlling for pay. But maybe I'm getting something wrong.
It does seem like D firm initiatives are often useless, performative, unproductive or non-essential.
Campus recruiting, proposals, event planning, diversity initiatives, client account staffing & finances, organizing training/lectures, social media posting, white papers and such.
Not that all of these are useless per se, but you're also constantly hustling in inexperienced people to do them - good for breadth but bad for unit productivity. If you see turnover/mobility as inevitable, it makes sense, and if you don't, it seems needlessly wasteful.
Admittedly, I have a more negative view because I've been doing things to check the box, not because they closely align with what I want - but so do most others. At D, the real networking is doing free unbillable work as tribute and validation of your skills in return for patronage from higher ups.
I can’t compare workload because I have only been here, but we don’t often furlough people. I’ve seen herculean efforts to retain people over my almost 20 years. We also hire to the bench, although conservatively and strategically but we absolutely do. Managers resist the heck out of it but it is how we grow.
We do have lateral mobility but our system isn’t good and since many of our jobs are on site contracts, people are really disconnected from how to make lateral moves. We’re also pretty good at team building and loyalty so I see a lot of people who want to move but “feel bad about it” so they never ask.” Mobility is the exception here rather than the norm.
D has a PDM model that removes the firm initiatives. However, in my opinion, D's PDM is not as good as BAH, because BAH has all the benefits whereas D's PDM has less benefits and more expensive benefits when compared to the Core/Traditional.
We absolutely do have accounts that hire people on to the bench and we also put people on the bench... I have seen someone on the bench for 12 months before they received their letter, letting them go.
From what I know, the PDM model at D has a bench of like 2 weeks?
My understanding is that Deloitte GPS in Core/Traditional is great if you are willing to put in more time and network... You will get paid more and have great benefits.
However, the PDM is not as good because of the weaker benefits, no paid training, only 3% 401k match and no pension, and payroll deductions for health insurance are higher than for Core/Traditional employees.
BAH has a great WLB, we have great benefits with paid training and 6% 401k match, and we have affordable health insurance. I don't think BAH can pay like the Core/Traditional model of D, but we can pay as good as PDM but with better benefits,
Sounds like you're doing alright OP, and it sounds like you're Core/Traditional track.
I was contacted by a recruiter at D, but it was for PDM. At the time, I didn't know enough about PDM. I went through the interviews, got the offer, but they were never forthcoming with benefits cost (payroll deductions) I had to come to fishbowl and reddit to get the answers.
I wound up having BAH match the offer for TC, and I got to keep the BAH benefits which are better than PDM at D.
Had the offer been core/traditional, I probably would have taken it for the higher TC potential.
We compete for the same worn and typically lose on cost — by a long shot— because they have much smaller overhead. Much more of a fed contractor and staff aug-like operation. I think it really mirrors PDM more than Core
Fair points, thanks for the explanation.
I've seen clients go to LPTA and back, it's not pretty... It does sound like it's not really a BAH quality issue across the board, so much as BAH is willing to play along to whatever low pay the gov rewards with corresponding quality, which is possible when people's pay is determined by their contract.
Deloitte does the opposite, where pay is not influenced by your account, not directly anyway - often to the chagrin of account management that struggle with low billing rates (and that's where take-up of USDC/PDM is highest).
I know I'm resurrecting a zombie thread, but adding my two cents for anyone else who might be searching for this info.
I've spent time at both Deloitte and BAH, though admittedly my time at Deloitte was over a decade ago (back when managing directors were still directors), so some of my experience might be outdated.
Much of the core client work, presuming you aren't on a staff aug contract at BAH, is the same at both firms. I'm at IT PM and my individual work plus the kind of work my teams did was the same at both firms.
It's the extra stuff at Deloitte that gets you, all the firm initiatives. I understand that the institutional mindset has changed since then, but when I was there you were explicitly rated on the number of hours of firm initiatives you'd done, not the actual impact of the firm initiatives, and it was an utter mess. At least in my part of Deloitte (I was in SI), we had high minimum targets for firm initiative hours, and since we were rated in comparison to our peers, those minimum targets were way lower than actual expectations. I was a SC and M there and my realistic minimum annual firm initiative target was 600-900 from year to year. As an experienced hire who didn't have any internal connections at the firm, my first year I got involved with every disparate firm initiative I reasonably had the bandwidth to get involved with and it was a s-show because just about everyone else involved in those firm initiatives was taking the same shotgunning approach I did, and as a result, there was no cohesive gameplan with any of them. I echo what others have said about the performative, needless nature of the firm initiatives.
BAH does have firm initiatives, but outside of the SA+ ranks, they aren't mandatory at the firm level. Some accounts and admin chains have individual BD expectations and the like, but those aren't standardized across the board. SA+ are expected to grow the business and be involved in various internal initiatives, but at the LA on down ranks, you can largely get by with just your client work.
Regarding comp, with the exception of bonuses, BAH *can* pay the same or better than Deloitte at a 1:1 level up through the SM/SA level. There is no pay standardization at BAH, though, so the exact same person might make $125k in one part of the firm while making $180k in another. The bonuses below SM/SA level is where Deloitte consistently blows BAH out of the water across the board.
If you're a lateral from Deloitte to BAH, or getting a promo in the process, you *could* stand to get a sizeable pay bump depending on where you're going to be at BAH.
Others have covered the benefits comparison, so I won't go into that aspect.