Very Poor Management in Tax and Assurance
Pros
The people at the firm are top-notch. A lot of friendly, easy-going people. The benefits are good and the salary is competitive with the market. Promotion is fairly common. You'll have the opportunity to rise through the ranks, just as you would at any public accounting firm.
Cons
I personally work in tax and assurance so this is based solely on my experience in this field. The management is awful and most do not care about their employees. They don't split work up between employees well at all. You will have certain staff working 55+ hour weeks year-round while others have free time or are allowed to work less than 40 hours a week. Often times, the employees working longer hours are not rewarded for their efforts, either. The seniors and management also do a very poor job of communicating with each other. They all expect their assignments to be done with priority over other work, all while refusing to discuss the staff's schedules with each other to work out a feasible plan. This leads to longer hours, more stress, and more fatigue on the staff, which will lead to more mistakes. If management was more effective at communicating with other teams about splitting up work and scheduling, the environment would be much better. Doing so would also justify them paying most staff the same salaries. Most staff are paid the same, with $1,000 variances up and down for a few people, but, again, this is ridiculous considering you have people working up to 15+ more hours per week than their peers that are getting paid the same. These hours are also just going to get worse. Management only cares about revenues, just like any other firm. Baker Tilly is focusing on growth in revenues and adding more clients, all while seeing the number of employees stay the same. This will lead to longer hours, and from what I've seen, these hours are being allocated to the few employees that are already working exorbitant amounts. Work-life balance is also non-existent for many people. You will see long hours around deadlines at any public firm, but the poor job of spreading work evenly has led to many people having far less time outside of work than their peers. You will have staff that are working on an approved 9-4 schedule while others are forced to work longer hours like I mentioned above. This, again, comes back down to poor management.