Long hours, slave labour, highly political, old technology, people from an old world locked in a Big Four firm. Technology is backwards, you have to purchase your own monitors, benefits are almost nil.

Politics, Politics and politics.
A bunch of folks that don't want to change.
If you want to be productive, don't expect technology to be there.
The way EY does things is to throw lots of people into it and who survives.
Blaming culture.
Hugh resistance to change.

As a tax intern this summer, I was provided ample experience in the tax practice. However, finding work was sometimes difficult and spread around disproportionately, as I ended up with days of no chargable work while others received overtime everyday. In the end, I did not have enough passion with tax to continue with it at this point, and I feel that you must have a true interest in tax to be a tax professional, and those that I worked around certainly had that passion. I did not.

Accounting does not thrill me. I plan on working here for another year to two years to learn about the "language of business", get my MBA, then take my knowledge and experiences into industry. Don't get me wrong, the people here are great, its just that Tax just doesn't get me up in the morning.

We definitely have some varied hours over here. It completely depends on the project that you get staffed on. I've only worked a couple 2am days, but some of my colleagues have been burnt out from working till 4am every day of the week during the busy seasons! It's a little extreme, and the competitive environment makes you not want to stay and help out because you know that it will be your turn to stay up that late very soon.

You will travel for about 80% of your work time in Business Advisory. It sounds fun, but the truth is that the travel will definitely play a big toll on your body and moral. Employees know that the environment is fierce, so we fly in ealry on Monday morning to get a head start and leave the client site late Friday evening to get home. We put in the extra hours because we know that if we don't, someone else will and they will get the recognition.

Travel seems to completely depend on luck. I have been staffed at the office for pretty much my entire career. On the other hand, one of my peers who was hired with me has pretty much traveled around the world on client engagements. I would love to get staffed on those projects, but it really depends on your availability and when you are in-between projects.