Pros
Tons of work and opportunity to learn a ton about the service line. You're given a ton of responsibility early on out of necessity, which can be a positive or negative depending on how driven you are to grind out the corporate ladder.
Cons
There was no onboarding process whatsoever, you spend 99.9% of your time learning on the fly, which leads to very long hours. You're transitioned from one busy deal to another due to low headcount. Teams are generally made up of an analyst/senior, VP (manager), and MD. Most VPs I worked with were useless and refused to do any of the actual work, and provided very limited value. Promotions from analyst to senior were common, promotions above senior was pretty much non-existent. Resources were also extremely limited, the firm employs a team in India for overnight support but the team was essentially enslaved to the Chicago office which brings in ~50% of the groups revenue, all other offices that needed support were pretty much out of luck. The firm really struggles to instill any sort of culture, you feel very disconnected from your local team members as the firm staffs deals at a national level. You end up getting tossed around with zero regard for the hours you were putting in to your last deal. Your performance is driven very strongly by your utilization rate, which can be skewed downward when there is pressure to finish a project within budget. You're generally staffed on multiple deals simultaneously which requires you to work most weekends. Booking PTO was a fools errand as work always took precedent over PTO and corporate holidays. MDs are extremely revenue focused. TLDR; Very limited resources, long hours, average comp, no culture, limited upward mobility unless very dedicated and loyal, no onboarding process, old/cheap technology