My Brief experience working at Accenture
*Throwaway account and idc anymore, so will be brutally honest*
I joined Accenture middle east in jan 2025 and quit recently, so over a year. I left a highly stable & good environment job for Accenture as I’m an ambitious guy and wanted to test myself. I joined as an L8 and my hopes were to never leave and eventually retire with this company; little did i know what I had actually gotten myself into. Wish I looked at this reddit before joining then I would've negotiated with my old employer instead of joining this hellhole.
I got thrown into a project with terrible financials, client was very unhappy as work was not even 50% completed, and we were bleeding money. I was told to take charge of a proverbial shitshow and immediately it felt like I was onboarded to be the fall guy, I had insane pressure from both client and ACN to deliver & close the project immediately while I was barely onboarded and still on probation. The higher management knew exactly what kind of shitshow it was but pretended everything was fine while the client wanted to skin Accenture alive. Regardless, I worked an average of 12hr days + weekends without any overtime for months, completely destroyed my physical and mental health, somehow persevered, and delivered the project phase 1.
During the next phase of the project, things took a turn for the worse as a new senior project manager (Arab guy) came in that I had to report to and internal politics took over. Initially things seemed ok, guy pretended to be my friend, I spent countless hours and weekends teaching him everything about the project and technologies as he was hopelessly incompetent to learn everything on his own. I then got to know from my PL that he’s reporting to higher management that I’m not delivering anything while he was telling me to my face that I was doing a great job and he will recommend me for a promotion in the upcoming cycle. I must say that it hurt to learn of the backstabbing; The worst part was when I finally learnt why he did all this: He did all this because he was a racist AF Arab and me being a Southasian pushing back on certain things and his dumb ideas didn’t sit right with him. He wanted me replaced in the project with somebody he could easily manipulate & control. It’s common knowledge in the region that most Arabs tend to think of Southasians as beneath them and they don’t like it if they’re not completely submissive. Not saying all Arabs are like this, I’ve had many good interactions too, but let’s be honest with ourselves for a little bit please.
I followed the procedure, escalated, and raised my concerns with the HR and my PL once I learned the truth; However, nothing happened. I got the usual “Accenture takes this very seriously and we will investigate” but nothing came of it and I ended up leaving the project. I basically got told that “Accenture is in a very fragile position right now; this client is too important for us and we can’t afford any changes”. They offered me another project but I declined and chose to resign instead because I wasn’t confident the environment would improve in any way. Several other people in the same project and department also quit around the same time because of similar reasons yet no action was taken by Accenture as all they cared about is higher management meeting their sales quota by selling services that we couldn’t even offer or had expertise in i.e. scamming clients.
I’ve come to the conclusion that Accenture is basically an Indian company disguised as a western one as it offers the same toxic work culture that is prevalent in Indian organizations. Maybe the situation is a little different in the west, but I have my doubts. In the last couple of months with the stock falling and the company not doing well, it seems as if everyone is aware that this is a sinking ship now and they’re trying to milk it for every last drop. I honestly don’t see how Accenture (and other consultancy firms) exist in the next decade when AI can easily do 99% of their job. You just can’t scam charge $1000/hr to make fancy ppts anymore in the new world while pretending to deliver great value to clients using nonsense 'Corporate speak'. Tbh, I’m glad to see what’s happening with this company now and this consulting scam finally unfolding. Accenture has been such a terrible experience that I’m actively exploring entrepreneurship now as I don’t ever want to put myself in such a terrible position again. I’d happily earn half of what I was making before doing my own thing as no amount of money is ever worth going through all this.
//end rant