26-Year-Old EY Employee Succumbs to 'Work Stress' Four Months After Joining

People here will not understand but there is a lot of background and culture behind this. There was another case where a McKinsey consultant (IIT+IIM postgrad) who joined the firm and commited suicide (https://www.consultancy.in/news/4168/young-mckinsey-consulta...).

The story starts way back. In general the schooling syllabus in India is very broad and deep (I can say this now since I live outside India). Then due to the large population - around 30 million students complete school every year. After that there are not many good universities (you may have heard of IITs or NITs), only around 100-200K get into good unis. The competetion to get in is therefore intense. Preparation for these "entrance exams" can start at age 15 (or even earlier).

If someone makes it somehow, graduation, postgrad and MBA is another similar struggle. Now you think you surely made it. The last 7-8 years of intense work and hardship are over, this is doubly true if the person is not from a well off family in India (which is very common). Preparation schools, hostels, being away from family etc. has its mental costs.

Then you land a job and it hits you, as a new joiner in the hugely competitive Indian job market you are treated like sh* and all this while you thought "you made it" but the real struggle has just started. Long working hours, immense pressure and then the thought that all the hardwork you did in the past can come crashing down with one bad review. Combine that with the real stuggles of life as you move to a new city, manage finances, support family back home etc. it creates a huge amount of pressure. Some unfortunately are not able to handle it, they are in a position they feel that all was futile and no one can understand their situation.

I think the most tragic of all is that, based on my experiences in both startups and corporate cultures, most of that work people are killing themselves for is just "busywork" handed to them by managers who themselves don't know any better.

The amount of waste in human energy & effort in pointless jobs that optimise for "being busy" is, as far as 1st-world problems are concerned, a humanitarian tragedy.

I qualified as a CA with EY in London around 15 years ago in banking audit. Left soon after qualifying. Some weeks I clocked in over 50 hours but never usually much more. Never had to do an all-nighter though I knew loads of people who did. Part of the reason I had a good experience was that I was lucky enough to work with an excellent manager who was well organised and knew how to audit without wasting time on spurious nonsense. I had to sacrifice a few Easter bank holidays in busy season but we got back the time in lieu. Outside of busy season was fairly quiet - Thursday afternoon pub lunches etc.

Some people did far more hours than me but I think it was mostly self imposed. A small minority of the partners were twats but the vast majority were mindful of people’s well-being. Friday evening drinks in corney and barrow were sacred and on days I didnt want to work longer I just got up and left to the disbelief of the audit room - they got over it though!

I’m a CPA that worked in Big 4 accounting before quitting and switching into software engineering. To get my CPA, I had to obtain a master’s degree, sit for and pass all four sections of the CPA exam, and then work for roughly a year under a licensed CPA. The last requirement was easiest to fulfill at a Big 4.

What I got for all of those credentials coming out of school was a starting salary of 55,000 in California and a whole lot of stress. Busy season was 80+ hour work weeks and included working on the weekends. I tried pushing back about working on Sundays, but I was the only one on the team who didn’t work.

Once busy season was over, I was sold on the idea that the Summer would be easy, but that wasn’t the case. The partners took on more clients to generate more revenue for themselves, and I continued working 40+ hours during the Summer despite being told I wouldn’t.

Worse, we couldn’t get newer members to join out of college and started outsourcing all of our audit work to the Philippines and India. The work from the Philippines was somewhat passable, and the work from India was unusable. So I had to do all this coordinating across time zones and a never ending amount of corrections to make the work meet the quality expected by a US-based audit firm. It wasn’t fun in the slightest.

You can never have a perfect audit because there’s always more work that you can do. The system pushes you to fill every waking hour that it can get from you with work. It’s mostly meaningless busy-work that shouldn’t be ans stressful as it is. All of that for 55,000 with a graduate degree. Worse, the firm achieved record profits in 2020 yet froze salaries for those being promoted to senior (supposed to be a jump to about 100,000).

I really miss the ease of interviews from having a CPA and the protections afforded by a body overseeing the industry. It was a lot better than the system we have as software engineers. But the sheer amount of work and stress was truly not worth the pay.

Every junior in consulting companies that I spoke to has been explicit in saying that these companies put an excessive amount of work on new hires to gate those that don't want to grind out - and artificial effort barrage.

Life gets easier once they get past this stage.

Having had abysmal managers in my past, I always ask - where was in this case the manager's managers, and why has his shitty behavior not been reported in skip level?

So why did she die exactly? You don't just die from overwork, and the real reasons can be surprising. There's a famous case of a medical worker who died in NY from overwork, except she also had a serotonin syndrome and essentially overheated to death: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Libby_Zion_Law

Indian management in India almost always sucks.

How is the payment for this type of conditions is it worth it? Working 7 days a week for 12h is over 80h/week that’s twice as many hours than the standard in Europe does it come with double payment?

Worked at EY in Europe. Usually 50-60 hours a week. 80-hour weeks were fairly common, especially on M&A projects. Once clocked 100 hours in a week on an urgent due diligence. But I'm hearing those days are gone and people there have much better work/life balance now.

From my experience auditing companies seem too erratic too in their findings.

At an old job we had one Auditing firm (Deloitte or KPMG??) auditor who found a lot of issues. The auditor found a single cash register receipt among a year's worth of receipts, a pile, with the login name the supervisor not the employee. The supervisor forgot to log off and an employee used the cash register for one or two sales.

A new auditing firm the next year found no issues which I knew was bull since the place changed over staff a dozen times and new management was far more incompetent.

Reading this you almost get the sense that this compounding workload was deliberately cruel and backbreaking. Is this some kind of hazing done to new hires, or does EY just have an unbelievably toxic work culture in general?

The fetishisation of work addiction has a part to play in this. People have a tendency to accept abuse when they think it's "normal". For example, if your parents fought and argued all the time it's natural to think that's normal and find yourself in a similar, toxic relationship and never question it. We keep getting fed this idea that you need to break your back ("grind") to succeed, that working all day and all night is a good thing etc. So people will push themselves much further than they otherwise would.

The people who cared for this person told her to stop, but she kept going because she believed (and this is a direct quote from the still grieving parent) that "becoming a chartered accountant involves years of toil, hardship and sacrifice". But who is telling these lies? The media, who fetishise this stuff, and the people who "made it" who, by the way, inherited their wealth, were a nepotism hire or are just more genetically gifted and/or lucky than you. Everyone will tell you their job is hard, they struggle and they deserve what they have, yet their backs are miraculously intact.

Getting to the position I'm at has involved years of work and study, but hardship and toil? You've got to be kidding. I enjoy what I do. It's not a hardship. I read books and write programs for fun. I would never tell anyone that to succeed in this field they need to lose sleep and sacrifice their health and relationships. That would be abusive. That's how this starts.

Asian work culture is toxic

people talk about Japan/Korea, but it's the same all over, just that other countries are not famous enough economically to count.

(basically all the hard work, none of the benefits)

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Like I'm in Pakistan, I passed all my accountancy papers but I never went on to an audit firm because they pay below minimum wage, and they work so late that I realised I just didn't make sense, for one I'd be too late to catch the bus home. (Also another hilarious reason I'll share later.)

For context, The minimum wage in pakistan for 2024 is 37,000 PKR per month [1] (That's 132 USD per month. Yes, one hundred thirty two dollars, for a whole month) This what you would pay for manual 'un-skilled' labour.

The stipend rate for ICAP trainees depends on stage[2], but goes from PKR 19,700 ($70) to PKR 84,700 ($304) per month, but most people I knew were at the stage that pays PKR 30,700 ($110) per month. It's the same for any org hiring an ICAP trainee, be it Big4 or whatever.

They call it stipend, to imply it isn't a salary and affected by salary laws, but these are proper 9am-9pm 6 days a week jobs you have to do for atleast 3 years.

My accounting body ACCA (UK based, but works intenationally), doesn't specify a standard stipend rate, which means accounting firms are free to abuse us even below the pitiful ICAP rate.

Here is an ad[3] on their own job board, by an 'ACCA-approved' employer, offering 15-20K stipend per month. ($54-$72)

____

This leads to the other, hilarious reason why I never went into an accounting firm... because we were banned by ICAP. Since ACCA never fixed rates, accounting firms starting hiring ACCA over Pakistani CA students, because they could pay use even less.

This led to ICAP banning accounting firms from hiring non-Pakistan based accounting body students. Then ACCA had to go to the Competiton Commission of Pakistan [4] to get this ruling turned over.

But by the time the judgement came in our favour, it had been too late for people like me.

Anyhoo, I went on to other jobs, then went back to uni, currently doing my MSc (distance learning), but I do wonder sometimes what the other path would have taken me.

Maybe I'd have been dead by overwork like the poor lady in the link. I guess that ban might have saved my life.

____

[1]: https://www.dawn.com/news/1855605/govt-notifies-rs37000-mini...

[2]: https://icap.org.pk/students/training/stipend-rates/

[3]: https://jobs.accaglobal.com/job/12888611/acca-accountant-int...

[4]: https://cc.gov.pk/home/viewpressreleases/267

More fuel for the fire. The wonderful American import of "guilt-fuelled work culture" where how hard you work direcrly correlates with your worth as a person. Remember, your career is worthless and your effort in school is wasted unless you have good word on your resume, feel guilty enough yet, lazybones?

Those shareholders like it because it makes more money, and they are encouraged to be the sort of people that should want more money too. Good for them, successful businesspeople!

This disgusting, inhuman pursuit "of number go up" has reached new heights because of the globalism issue. Citizens of successful, comfortable nations, instead of being economically free to pursue greater meaning and develop humanity further via the arts, and other pursuits of meaning, are instead forced to compete with millions of starved, desperate workers from developing nations, who are worked so hard they die in an accountancy job, and they are in turn pitched against the lowest bidder Why? corporate greed. How dare YOU ask for your number to go up as well, this other guy will do it for less and he has more qualifications than you!

Billionaires should not exist

Something I've noticed over the years based on my experience having consulted for over a hundred organisations is that skilled managers will make their employees work more efficiently, and unskilled managers can only make their employees work harder.

Both methods can achieve higher output but the latter can squeeze out maybe +30% for a finite period of time until the employees burn out, but the former has no ceiling on productivity gains. You can achieve 10x, 100x, or even 1,000,000x efficiencies by not wasting time, using automation, better methods, or whatever. I've had serious discussions where the "work harder" people were suggesting 100 outsourced Indian IT techs for two years to do something I could do in a couple of weeks with some scripting. That's a 5,000x difference, in case you're counting.

The inevitable consequence of this attitude is that to achieve "top performance", some orgs flog their staff like slaves to eke out +60%.

EY is pretty bad in the U.S. as well. They're Big 4 in terms of revenue but they haven't been Big 4 in terms of industry reputation for years.

What little reputation EY had left was basically set on fire when their very-hyped "Project Everest" restructuring abysmally failed over basic issues that should have been addressed in the beginning. EY spent a fair amount to plan the restructuring and took on a fair amount of debt to pair for it (and of course it did this before bothering to make sure the stakeholders would actually go through with the plan)...

Clients began to wonder why they should trust EY with their restructuring/business planning/etc if EY couldn't even handle its own. This resulted in a pretty significant outflow of clients in the consulting and tax groups.

The debt service and loss of revenue led to several rounds of layoffs (in the U.S., and overseas), frozen promotions, etc. PwC and Deloitte were the major benefactors, but a lot of the Next 20 firms also scooped up former EY employees and clients. (Unfortunately for the remaining EY employees, like the woman in the reddit link, this led to severe overwork.)

The business model of every industry I look into, from electrician and carpenter shops to investment banking and management consulting, seems to run on the backs of an army of new hires who are worked to death by a small number of well paid senior people who lead very comfortable lives.

This is reminiscent of the plot for Episode 1 of Season 1 of the TV Show Industry :-(

The one time I interviewed for a consultancy position, I felt "burn-out" from the interview itself. Under the veneer of “here we value always learning, see I was learning about field X this week, and field Y the week before”, the subtext was: you are not going to have a balanced life, cheerful fresh grad.

It took me a bit to process why I felt so uncomfortable after the interview. Then a friend made it clear to me: you weren’t interviewing for a tech company, but for a consulting company (which works on tech solutions).

I was thrown a curveball question in the partner’s domain of expertise which I managed to sort-of-answer, only to be told “Oh, I didn’t expect you to be able to answer.” Wtf? And in the end, it was made clear I wouldn’t be compensated much.

The only time ime where the interviewer failed my “interview”.

The sad thing is that these kinds of positions seem like the only viable path for some. And that this kind of grind is presented as the proper thing to engage in.

I wish the best for the bereaved and the deceased.

“ there is no work life balance in corporate life, you just have to build one”

Wise words.

Working in big 4 consulting must be the worst corporate career in America. Low prestige, long hours, mediocre pay/benefits. The skills you develop are a mile long but an inch deep.

It’s crucial that companies address these toxic work cultures!

Afaik these sorts of consulting firms are built on the strategy of grinding people down and replacing them often. They know that having them on the CV is desirable and they deliberately burn people out with workload.

But hey we gave up on labor rights and protections long ago, so what can be done?

[flagged]

Capitalism claims one more victim.