Accenture

1. Challenging, interesting work. I genuinely enjoy the work I do with Accenture.

2. Smart, friendly coworkers. With the occasional outlying exception, I never feel condescended to or patronized for asking for help. Everyone is eager to help you achieve your best work.

3. You own your career, and there are lots of great opportunities. You just have to stand up and take them.

1. The company's laddering (pay & promotion) system.

The company claims to be a meritocracy, but my experience has been that if you succeed with one high-visibility thing, you can ride that curried favor for years.

1. The salary.

It's better to think of Accenture as a place to build a professional network and gain marketable experience.

1. There is a certain point beyond which you can't advance your career unless you start moving into project leadership roles or selling work to clients.

Not a con for everyone, but it sucks for someone like me who signed up for programming, not sales or management.

1. There's an absurdly high amount of documentation that needs to be written for every tiny change, but I think that's mostly an issue with my particular project, not Accenture as a whole.

2. Aggressive project goals means sometimes working lots of overtime.

Management needs to find a better way of estimating tasks.

A manager once told me that if the estimating method is correct, you will underestimate about a quarter of the time, overestimate about a quarter of the time, and be right on target about half the time.

That argument is pretty weak if all tasks in the "overestimated" bucket are relatively simple, minor fixes, and all tasks in the "underestimated" bucket are world-changing, redefining enhancements.

This is even more of a problem when team leads make an estimate, and upper management says to cut that estimate in half because otherwise it won't meet the delivery time frame they promised the client.