Virtually IB hours with Virtually Audit pay - Senior Consultant FTI Consulting Employee Review

TL;DR - I found the culture of FTI to be toxic and the compensation to be below market. I worked in the Corporate Finance & Restructuring segment (2 yrs in TS, plus ~1yr working on Rx projects while technically still in TS). The hours were only a hair’s width better than IB, with weekday hours in Rx often comparable to IB with an only slightly lower probability of working the entire weekend (although I once had a stretch where I worked something close to 57 of 60 consecutive calendars days, vs. 45ish “working days” during the same period). My peak hours booked was around 3600 in a single year (including time booked to non-billable/internal project codes). COVID (spring 2020) made things less like “working from home” and more like “living at work” with regular 3 am nights followed by 8 am mornings. CHIP (the billable hours based variable comp) seemed to be used more often as a stick than a carrot, with project SMDs routinely signing on to unrealistic “sprint” projects and justifying ridiculous hours with CHIP. G-d forbid you actually make a lot of variable comp because there was widespread perception and my anecdotal experience that it would be held against you in your year-end “discretionary bonus” and comp adjustment. E.g., In a year where I had the third most billable hours of any individual in my practice, I received a below average raise and below average year-end bonus, despite high marks (top quintile) on my performance reviews. High margin services, eg bankruptcy/Rx, appear to be used to subsidize comp in low margin services, likewise highly billable consultants seem to be used to subsidize average billable consultants. Hence, an SC who bills enough hours to make $150K in restructuring at FTI seems like they could have made north of $200-250K at A&M (dependent on realization of hours, as FTI is based on gross hours above a threshold multiplied by a roughly 10% rate vs total realized revenue multiplied by a rate of >20%, less base comp at A&M. Net net, top quintile performers appeared to be materially underpaid at the time I worked at FTI). Steve (the CEO) shoulD run for POTUS when he retires, not because he’s bad at his job but rather because he’s so good at talking a lot without committing to anything substantive (talk to anyone who’s ever asked him a question at one of his “town halls” and ask them how directly he answered the specific question asked). Culture felt like working working with a bunch of people who wished they worked at Goldman Sachs in the 80s. I cannot name a single ad-hoc social event that was budgeted and approved unless at least one-to-two SMDs we’re able to attend. Junior staff camaraderie felt more like commiseration. During the peak of COVID, level-based retention bonuses were issued on a “need-to-know” basis (meaning if you didn’t get one you had to hear about everyone who did through the grape vine, without any top-down transparency as to who received retention bonuses and why). I can recall one currently employed MD who’s idea of a good time while traveling for work included trips to local casinos and on at least one occasion a strip club. Every full/half-day “training” I ever attended included the expectation that I’d keep up with any billable work, resulting in the need to either work during the training, or in the evenings. (Purely anecdote, I cannot speak for anyone’s experience beyond my own experience attend a total of less than 10 such trainings during my time at FTI). Career progression is highly correlated with years of service. I would tend to hear the word “early” used to describe people who get promoted faster than typical - including individuals such as myself - an odd way of describing a merit-based promotion. Service lines are highly silo’d and politics make the internal talent flow / hiring process an absolute joke - in my case, it literally took a global pandemic to switch practices and even then it was temporary. Prior to COVID, asking to “try” or rotate temporarily into another practice resulted in MDs and above who were observed to be quick to tell me that doing so would prevent me from being promoted “early” (paraphrase: “well if you go and do Practice X for six months, then it’s going to be awful hard for you to get the ‘early’ promotion you’re currently on track for in Practice Y”). MDs and above in practices that are fixed-fee, prone to going over budget, and who’s hours aren’t reviewed by a federal court (read: TS) on more than one occasion were observed to pressure staff to “eat hours” or, even worse, reallocate billable time from over budget projects to under budget projects that the consultant wasn’t even staffed on. Junior staff lucky enough to achieve ‘pet’ status were observed to occasionally be thrown a bone and allowed to ghost bill time for hours they didn’t actually work in some instances. EG, during my final 2 weeks, I was anecdotally asked by a project manager to reverse roughly 50 hours of billed time so that others on the project team could ghost bill my hours and inflate their variable comp. (I wouldn’t have been eligible for the bonus from those hours since I was leaving before the pay date, so why not just give that shareholder money to someone else on the team right?) DE&I felt less like a serious commitment and more like a tool to justify below market comp increases as the only time I recall that DE&I would *ever* get mentioned (outside of HR trainings / firmwide platitudes) was in the context of annual comp adjustments (e.g., paraphrasing: “before releasing final comp figures, we have a third party consultancy review all comp decisions for equity/fairness”) All that said, there are many people currently/formerly at FTI whom I have a great deal of respect for and would happily work with professionally again, just not at FTI.