Pros
1.) Exposure to large publicly traded clients (including Fortune 500). 2.) Bounce around to many different audit clients and understand different industries (a lot of exposure and visibility). Example: After auditing for a little while you will see why a tech company is 1000X better than manufacturing company. Likewise, you see where intelligence people tend to work, and where you may want to work someday. 3.) Graduate from an average state school with good grades and good social skills, and Deloitte will hire you in audit (if you network and put on a quality campaign for yourself). This is a FANTASTIC way to get onboard the with a top global client services company, without going to a top business school. 4.) After putting in 12 months with the firm (and preferably obtaining your CPA), recruiters will NOT stop call you and messaging you on LinkedIn. Constantly pulling your arm to get you into jobs paying $20-30k more per year. Not a bad ROI for one year or work if you ask me. 5.) Great firm wide training. Deloitte University in Dallas, TX is fantastic. 6.) Work with highly intelligent people, most of whom are from humble beginnings (in audit, not consulting). 7.) Excellent networking opportunities. If you are at least able to make it a couple years, and make senior, you will be rewarded. There is a certain boys club you enter into when joining Big 4. In industry, you will encounter loads of ex-Big 4 CPA's. You will earn respect throughout your entire career, amongst your peers, after working at Deloitte.
Cons
1.) Everyone knows the pay is bad and the hours are long, that is nothing new. You need to realize that you are sacrificing current income for more training and resume building. You will be rewarded with future income. At least make senior before thinking about leaving. 2.) You may realize that you hate audit, and possibly accounting in general. I am getting incredibly fed up with what we do in audit. I see what people one or two years above me are doing and I am not amused. The longer you stay in audit at Deloitte, the more trapped you will be into an accounting career. Ex, if you want to get into treasury or finance, you will probably want to leave the firm directly after making senior. If you want to be a controller or accounting manager at an F500 company, for sure stay until manager. 3.) Everyone is hyper competitive, and very passive aggressive. People will subtlety let you know they are doing more than you, and that they are taking one more difficult areas than you are. 4.) General firm trainings are great, but very broad. If you want on-site training at the client, good luck. Everyone has WAY WAY too much to do, for them to take time to teach you something. Even asking for 8 minutes of someone's time is A LOT to ask. 45 second to 90 seconds is much more acceptable. If you are the type of person who likes someone to walk you through a project before you start it (in detail), HA good luck. Then your audit senior gets frustrated when you don't finish it fast enough or accurate enough. You can't win. 5.) People will ask you to do something that has never been before on that client, and then get frustrated if you can't do it quickly and accurately. Deloitte embraces the "trial by fire" learning style. 6.) Most partners have large egos. Not surprising when you realize they are all making over $500k. I respect that though because they put in the time to earn it. 7.) The goal of audit is just messed up. I joined audit because I felt the most important thing was analyzing financial statement accounts to find discrepancies, then fix those so that the investors and financial statement users were not mislead. This is actually wrong. Partners only care about completing the audit in the fewest number of labor hours possible, and avoiding ANY potential PCAOB review notes during an inspection. Our main concern is making sure we are covered if our particular audit was picked for an inspection. 8.) Some clients are fantastic, others are terrible. Some audit teams/managers are fantastic, others are terrible. Regardless, you deal with the consequences, and the pay is the same. Evaluations are the most important thing. Don't make anyone hate get rated a 3 and you'll cruise.