Cons summary: high workload; sometimes antisocial travel/location requirements; vertically-biased progression pathways leading to inconsistent management quality; small-company culture; poor experienced hire integration.
1. Lifestyle (travel, hours, diet): you spend a lot of time on site, which means travel (not the romantic kind; typically local councils and factories aren't located in tourist hotspots) and living out of hotels/air bnbs. This impacts your diet, since you will often end up eating out or ordering takeaways, and your personal life, since it can be pretty tough if you live with a partner/have kids/want to regularly see friends during the week. This is all often exacerbated by a high workload, which can result in regular evening work (in addition to core working hours of 0800-1800). However, this all varies a lot depending on the project you're on, your team, and the phase of the project. At worst, it can be 70-hour weeks in an industrial estate premier inn eating takeaway every night and feeling like your entire life is work. At best, it can be 45/50-hour weeks in a touristy town or central London, where you have a great team, get to go out for tasty, paid-for dinners every night, have regular fun nights and generally are loving life. Typically, it will fall somewhere in the middle of those two options, but a good team helps the situation in either case. This lifestyle can have huge ups and downs, but I do find that for me it flows into my weekends regularly, since I usually require a bit of decompression after an intense work week away from home, and don't love living out of a suitcase. To be transparent, this travel aspect gets better as you get more senior, but it rarely fully disappears, and the hours will always be quite long.
2. Progression pathways and management: mostly vertical pathways mean that almost everyone who gets promoted starts managing others. If you're someone who loves the hands-on aspect of delivery, this can be a tough transition (and might remove the part of the job you most enjoy). I also don't think that Newton does a good enough job in training people to manage before giving them that responsibility; while I'm a fan of learning by doing, I don't think that approach is fair from the point of view of the managee. I have unfortunately seen (and myself been guilty of) too much mis-management from inexperienced managers who were great at delivery, but have no idea how to run a team or deliver open and honest feedback. Sometimes people will give feedback for the sake of it, and other times it will be delivered with very little empathy or emotional intelligence. By no means is it an easy thing to deliver feedback well, but in a company which encourages such regular feedback, I think we could do a better job of training people in this area.
3. Company culture: Newton is no longer a small company (currently upwards of 600 people, and continuing to grow), but sometimes still seems to have a small-company culture. There are certainly some positives to this (closeness with peers, ability to be flexible, ability to drive high-impact internal change if you're bloodyminded enough, to name a few), but there are also some negatives. Firstly, it can lead to too much reliance on people to go above and beyond their usual scope to get things done if they are "non-essential". This can put you into a tough situation if you're passionate about something that is benefitting the company, but find that suddenly you are working all your evenings on that thing because you have no other time. It also means some initiatives just stop when individuals are on holiday/more intense projects. I understand this for totally extracurricular aspects of the job, but it can occasionally bleed into processes that become critical to the company and I can't always understand why someone isn't hired/given the time to dedicate to the activity. Secondly, the company can feel pretty cult-ish in how intense it gets. Some of this is fantastic, but the "work hard play hard" mentality can on occasion put people off if they aren't so sure of themselves or equally keen on the activity, plus it can come across as quite old-fashioned. I don't drink alcohol, and have often felt a little outside the bubble as a result, despite generally being friendly with everyone. The "party hard" mentality has also certainly led to some inappropriate behaviours, which seem totally avoidable. The company does seem to be responding to this and making changes, but I sometimes am not sure if they are doing enough - there's still an open bar almost every two weeks.
4. Senior management disconnect: majority are fantastic, but some are quite out of touch with the more junior consulting body. Sometimes, this is surprising because they themselves have come through the consulting body. This can lead to directors making overpromises to clients that then result in an unsustainable workload for the junior team and generally put them off consulting forever. As mentioned, I do think this is the exception, rather than the rule, but I have seen on more than one occassion. The proposed solution to this high workload is sometimes to miss out on the many social events that happen, which makes their purpose/value less clear.
5. High turnover: not sure this is a technically a con, just want to be honest about it so that you're not under any illusions. Lots of people leave, and plenty of people get fired. On the flipside, more people get hired so the company continues to grow. On the firing point, as mentioned on a few occasions already, Newton's main product is its people, and people get given a lot of responsibility quickly. Therefore, it's very clear to see if someone is underperforming. When the project team is less than 15 (or often 10) people in size, this can make a big impact on the overall project. So, understandably, support gets wrapped around the person struggling quite quickly, and then they either adapt to make it work for both themselves and Newton, or they don't and are let go. This sounds like an emotionless consultant thing to say (and fair enough, it probably is), but Newton as a company would not survive long if it didn't have a good mechanism for this. Sometimes I really dislike that aspect of working here (especially when it involves people I know/care about), and I think that most people quickly become numd to it, but it would be disingenuous to pretend it wasn't a reality and you should enter the job with an understanding that it is. Consulting is also definitely not suited for everyone, and sometimes it takes trying it to realise that. On the people leaving point, it happens for a bunch of reasons: less travel, better work/life balance, specialisation in a particular field/industry, starting your own company. The high attrition rate is expected and keeps the company growth at a sustainable rate. It's also worth noting that it's quite common for people to leave Newton and return within a couple of years; take from that what you will.
6. Poor experienced hire integration: as a grad, I didn't personally feel much pain from this, but I saw it for quite a few colleagues, including some former managers that I was close with. Newton has a way of working, and unfortunately isn't great at making the most of people's skillsets if they don't align with the existing approach. There are exceptions to this (people who land and absolutely smash it), but they are genuinely exceptions. Newton needs to get way better at this to have any chance of continuing to thrive at the rate it wants to.