My 3 week career at a big 4 firm

Or, how I learned I could never hold down a job.

In my final years of university, a good friend of mine got a summer internship at a big 4 consulting firm. He was doing Technology Consulting. I didn’t know what that meant at the time, and still don’t now, but he had more money than me when we went drinking and he was always buying nice shirts. I figured he must be doing something right.

A year later, I got a three week internship at the same firm doing Technology Risk. I didn’t know what that meant, but when I went to the careers night I was told it would involve a lot of hacking and security testing, which sounded cool. It was better than the other options; ‘Tech Consulting’ sounded like giving my opinion on things I didn’t understand, which wasn’t appealing at the time¹, and ‘Web Development’ wouldn’t work (because I was young and impressionable, I had been convinced that writing code was a dead end career and the only way to make a living in this field was in an advisory role).²

I turned up on my first day, got my desk, got my laptop, and…. got told to read documents from previous projects. There was no new work to be done. I read about a project which sounded like doing a security analysis of a medium sized bank. As far as I could tell, the team ran some automated testing tools and wrote a very long report about what those tools found. I assumed I was reading the wrong report and that the real hacking got documented elsewhere. (I wasn’t.)

A few days later I got assigned my first task: reviewing a proposal for some work we’d do for a client. I think the idea was that I’d be exposed to the sort of work we did by reading the sales pitches, but really I just fixed typos.

Toward the end of the week, I did my first client visit, at the local airport. Before driving out there, I was told to stop wearing a tie. I was very excited because I hate ties, but when I got to the client site I saw someone else wearing a tie, so I spent the rest of the day stressed that I’d been wearing my tie wrong.³

At the start of week two, I got assigned some actual work. A client owned lots of hardware; desktop computers, laptops, monitors, and various other bits of IT equipment. They needed an auditing system to keep track of where everything was. I made an Excel spreadsheet that documented all their assets in a day, then I spent the rest of that week teaching myself VBA scripting so I could make the cell highlighting fancier.

The next week we did a call with the client and sent them the Excel spreadsheet. They liked that we had audited where all their computers were. They didn’t care about the cell highlighting.

Later that day I got feedback from my manager. She said I was doing excellent work, but she was concerned that I wasn’t very sociable around the office. She wasn’t wrong - by this point I found the place so confusing I’d given up trying to understand it.

The night of the second last day of my internship was the office Christmas party. Like everyone else, I dressed up and went to the fancy venue they’d booked out. I drank my two free drinks, ate some nibbles, and avoided the (non-existent) dance floor. After a few hours I made some lame excuse to myself and went home.

For some reason the Christmas party was on a Thursday, so the next morning was my last day. I didn’t have any assigned work, and nobody else was planning on working, so I took my laptop to the office, handed it over to the IT guy, had a good chat with him (he was in on the whole joke), then went home and had a big nap.

About a week later, I was at the pub at 7pm when I got an email from my old manager asking if we could arrange an exit interview. I politely declined. She followed up a few more times, offering me jobs in many other departments at the firm, but by then I knew that I’d never be able to work for a big firm.

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I was really excited for this internship before I started. It was meant to be a safe, stable, enjoyable job, with good pay, in a firm that would never go out of business. The job offer at the end came with more money than I had ever seen. My Eastern European parents would be proud.

Still, it just didn’t seem like I was doing anything worthwhile by cataloging laptops in a spreadsheet so someone else could charge by the hour for it.

I've since learned that creating something valuable for others is the only tried and tested way to make money over the long term, while also making a better life for yourself. You can’t have job security, and job satisfaction, and great pay unless you are doing something unique and valuable.

Coming out of university most people believe they should make decisions based on whatever is in front of them that pays the most. If I’d stuck with the firm I would have made more money in the short term than I did by doing my own thing. But I would have been bored out of my mind. Is it worth spinning around on your chair (physically and psychologically) for 40 hours a week so you can buy nicer beer on the weekend?

Money is a tool - it’s only worth whatever you do with it to make your life more enjoyable. From this internship I learned that work is a tool, too.

If you can find work that you enjoy (whether that’s starting your own thing, or just doing work that matters), it’s inherently more valuable to you than work that you hate. Many many many people are not fortunate enough to have the opportunity to choose between these two options. But in my internship, I saw that so many people have the choice and still choose the glum path.

Author’s impression of his co-founders harassing him into starting a business.

ps. If you work in consulting, I would earnestly love to hear what I was missing about the whole experience. Leave a comment below or send me an email. If you just want to say you hate me that’s also fine, as long as you subscribe first.

1. how things have changed

2. lest you ever take advice from me, remember how dumb i was a decade ago

3. I can probably count on one hand the number of times I’ve worn a tie since.