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I just got an email from a recruiter from Google!
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He said that the position is in the Bay Area or New York. I haven’t replied the email. I don’t think we can move to those cities, but I don’t want to lose this opportunity. Does anyone know if Google does remote jobs within US?
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Is this what everyone is waiting for ? ⬆️
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People aren’t too bothered about the busy period it’s more about the lack of transparency / appreciation
For example - in the U.K. office we had pay rises lower than historical years. Not only that but we found out about this through money hitting our banks and to this date have not had any communication on this
They also changed the comp structure and made a portion of it a retention bonus - and framed it as a client satisfaction bonus; as if we wouldn’t notice!
We’re fed up of the lack of transparency and being manipulated / under-appreciated.
Makes no sense for pay to be at an all time low (relative to previous LEKers at the same tenure) when employee churn and workload is at an all time high
2020 revenue was higher than 2019. We didn’t hit our target growth but we were still up YOY
It’s MBB hours without being MBB and people get a little salty about that, but it’s still a great firm, exciting projects, and reputable name on anyone’s resume. The people on this app tend to be on the negative ends of the spectrum, I know plenty of colleagues at LEK that truly enjoy their job, often joke about the % of our firm that’s actually on here (typically the folks who want out).
Same
Chief
Forced unpaid time off was unacceptable tbh. Now the stories of an "employment pilot period" is the final straw
PwC1 - looking say their other comments makes me think they're being serious
US perspective here - I don’t mind working hard, but teams have been staffed poorly given over selling and it has translated into long hours. Also, our teams are led by new post MBA hires who often don’t have enough training / experience to manage work streams and associates, and this translates into frustrating experience for the team. And overarching theme, management has shown such little empathy for the situation. Also, management changed our pay structure to put more of TC into a perf bonus vs base pay, which is extremely frustrating. Also, during that move, they said total potential earnings did not change when I know that is false for the role I was going into. It’s blatant lies like that where you just lose faith in management. Managements solution also has been implementing golden principles to success and work life balance, but this hasn’t changes day to day projects at all. Overall, a whole lot of frustrations with management. I don’t mind working hard for those saying people are just complaining about that.
Let’s be real here for a sec, our MBAs are leading teams under heavy guidance from our Managers. Yes Managers are stretched thin with WFH and current staffing levels but we the Managers are realistically running the cases. We do a ton of behind the scenes work with the consultants (ie post MBA grads) to steer the case and coach them. The consultant is really the face to the associates managing more so the process details.
This works well on our DDs as we have a rather formulaic approach that Managers can coach consultants through. Not as much on true strategy cases but our postMBAs don’t typically get strategy in their first year.
The leadership has always been bad and not cared about their people. It’s driven by an eat what you kill incentive structure at the top and basically no inbuilt incentives to keep people happy.
That on top of historically high case volume, covid layoffs, and lack of central leadership, has pushed them to an almost comical extreme of draining the staff to the core by selling as many projects as possible and asking Staffing and Managers to “figure it out”. Now these insane initiatives for temp hiring, condescension to staff, repeated questionable decision making and stubbornness from the very top...
People are totally fed up. The attrition has never been worse maybe outside of 2009. Sadly think this is a turning point to the worse for LEK. Soon it’ll be only the MDs and brand obsessed die hards.. anyone else with another option will have left
So LEK is sorta misleading about the attrition numbers in the internal updates. HR takes people who left divided by previous year, year end headcount. Conceptually, it should be previous year, year beginning headcount, because you can hire a lot of people throughout the year to lower the attrition with a larger denominator
Not at all. I’ll do a full post soon-ish. But LEK is great overall. People are just mad and feel they should be wine and dined like MBB. It’s 10x better than big 4 mc (excluding EYP S&).
Remind me on Friday. Love the follow up haha
Ehhh it’s fine. We are just super busy, and people don’t like to work hard haha. It’s a busy time for all consulting firms and nothing extraordinary here.
Thanks OP 🙏
Come on over, we’re hiring. The grass is actually greener. Signed, a former LEKer who liked LEK
Pro
C1, are you ex-LEK now BCG?
We average 60-65 hours per week and based on the fishbowl comp bowl we compare pretty favorably. People are burnt out because we have been sold out to an extreme degree for so long and there’s no near term change expected. There are other QOL issues but that’s underpinning it.
Would you call MBB, Parthenon, OW, etc who work similar hours slave labor? Cmon.
Long hours (especially long because of how busy we are) without the social events to build camaraderie has been rough on morale
Brother worked there until recently and an acquaintance interned there a few summers ago - I’d take any T2 or even T3 over LEK. Their leadership has an extremely poor track record in managing & developing junior level consultants.
What horror stories? Do share
Why doesn’t LEK hire contractors rather than doing the pilot program? They would have to pay contractors more?
We are separately also doing a pilot contractor program. This new associate program and contractor program are being viewed very differently despite both being launched to address the current utilization pains. Managers and above were told the details.
I have also been in discussions where is was noted that the pilot associate program might have the added benefit of helping our longer term diversity goals because today, being so much smaller than MBB, we fill nearly all our spots with our targets school and these schools are less diverse.
There are no promises being made for past 6 months but everything I have heard for the associate program has been more so the mindset of looking to keep these ppl longer term. New contractor program I can’t say the same.
Pro
Sounds very normal. Friends worked at LEK in the 90s. Plus ca change....
Pro
I worked there in 2015. It was always a sweatshop but I learned a lot and it’s a good brand name. Has it really gotten that much worse?
Not really, remote working though has broken some of the key pieces of glue that kept our culture together.
Also was here in 2015, work level are slightly up, leadership has similar communication issues ... sentiments are all heighten by WFH. Our model needs the in office perks and bonds we create with each other to balance it out.