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Comment by adam | Hacker News Reader

Having worked in a consulting firm for years, I spent very little time in the office anyway. Instead I was constantly deployed to client sites. I wonder how this will impact those who are working for clients who have different policies. Will the consultants still be remote, or will they have to adhere to their client's policies, some of whom inevitably will require being in the office. In that case, this isn't as sweet a deal as it may seem.

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As a former dev in Risk Assurance: PwC’s offices are terrible and crowded open offices. It’s a godsend for the software people. Also lots of client engagement work happens offsite. Though of course to a large extent PwC’s job is to show up and look pretty.

City?

As a dev in Florida their offices were the nicest offices I had ever been to. Anyone could checkout window seats, standup desks, or regular cubicles.

I also disagree with the show up and look pretty. Real work was getting done the majority of the time everywhere I turned. People would often work hard and leave an hour or two early because they had better time management. I saw significantly more overall productivity than at other big clients in other states.

Tampa, circa 2015-2018, IIRC. I was on the 10th floor at 4040 Boy Scout for a couple months and it was glorious. Then we moved to the 4th floor and it was bad. They intentionally under buy office space there because they already expected the majority of their IT to work remote.

And yeah, PwC also does productive work. I have a friend who works in healthcare who said working with PwC was a nightmare - basically teaching their associates how healthcare worked. The comment about pretty is really about how PwC seems to hire intentionally for visual appeal in their client facing roles. The company is basically selling confidence in their competence, so using the halo effect is a pretty natural strategy. It also lingers for me as being a bit icky.

A lot of consultants I know do not want to work remote because they specifically enjoy the on-the-road lifestyle. My experience with many of my consulting colleagues is that this this type of news is great because they still get to travel to client sites, but also can live (almost) wherever they want on the weekends and not be tied to a specific PwC office location.

This was my exact question reading this. I figured as a consultant your either at a client or on a plane.

Also how will they determine this part: "Location does factor, however, into PwC employees' pay, Seals-Coffield said. Employees who opt to work virtually full-time from a lower-cost location would see their pay decrease, she added."

Presumably the majority of clients are now also work from home.

Nope. But they have become more understanding of those who are so long as performance is improved. Many will still require you onsite, but they don’t care where you fly in from.

I wonder what the percentage of PwC employees is who worked at client sites before the pandemic. I doubt it's the majority.

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