I’ve Worked at EY and Meta: Big Tech and Big Four Consulting Compared

This as-told-to essay is based on a conversation with Mandy Liu, who is in her early 30s, from China and based in London. The following has been edited for length and clarity.

Before I went to college, I didn’t know what consulting was.

I studied economics at the University of Virginia and graduated in 2016. Through the campus hiring process, I got a full-time job at EY in New York City. I worked at EY for two years in total. I was unsure about the direction to take my career, so I thought consulting might open doors without pigeonholing me.

Later, from 2020 to 2023, I worked in Big Tech at Meta.

Working at EY and Meta has carried a lot of weight on my résumé, and the industries have their pros and cons. If I were to go back, I’d start my career in tech.

Consulting helped me develop people skills, but it was hard to define my impact

As an analytics consultant at EY, I mainly helped clients understand what data they needed to collect to comply with financial regulations. After a year, I had to leave the US due to visa issues. I returned to China and worked for a different company for a brief period before relocating to London and working at EY for another year.

Working all day, every day with different clients, who tend to be more demanding than colleagues, helped me develop my problem-solving and people skills.

But your job is to give advice that the client may not implement, so it can be hard to define your impact. I found myself craving the ability to build and deploy a project and see the results.

I also traveled a lot, which I thought I wanted, but after traveling from Manhattan to Charlotte, North Carolina, every week to meet with clients for a few months, I was exhausted. It was hard to date anyone or establish a local friend group.

While working at EY, I sought out projects that enabled me to explore my passion for coding. It was nice to be in a job where I could have a lot of say in what I worked on.

I pivoted out of Big Four consulting into tech

After a while, I realized I wanted to gain more hard technical skills by pivoting into tech and away from finance.

I looked for more technical jobs in data analytics and data science, and a friend of mine in data science mentored me to make the pivot. After EY, I spent nine months as an analytics consultant for a software company before landing a data scientist job at Meta, then Facebook, in September 2020.

I chose to work with a team responsible for user account safety, which involved monitoring the number of hacked accounts and those at risk of being compromised, and ensuring users could efficiently recover their accounts.

I stayed at Meta for three years before I worked at Nextdoor as a data scientist for around eight months. Last year, I started my own career and brand coaching program, which I focus on full-time.

Consulting and Big Tech were stressful in different ways

I’ve seen day-in-the-life videos of Google engineers drinking smoothies and playing with dogs, so that’s what I imagined Big Tech would be like.

The three years I spent at Meta were probably the years I worked the hardest and grew the most in my career. I joined study groups and learned from other people’s work to upskill on the job.

In my opinion, a year at Meta is equivalent to two years elsewhere. People have high expectations for delivery, and things move fast.

The upside is that you work with smart people who’ll push you. You also see how a world-class company operates using the latest technology. But it’s high stress.

Consulting was stressful in a different way. Stress came from making your client happy, so if they sent you an urgent message at 7 p.m., you had to respond or at least look at it.

Whereas Meta had a high standard for employees and cared a lot about our outcomes, not just the process. In consulting, if you put in 50 hours, you bill for 50 hours. But at Meta, saying you spent five hours working on a project didn’t matter unless there was a positive outcome.

At Meta, I liked working against performance metrics and focusing on deliverables. Completing a big project, such as running an A/B testing experiment that helped the company decide which features to implement, made me feel like I was having a direct impact and gave me a big sense of achievement. It felt very different from consulting, where I never knew if clients were implementing my advice.

If I could go back, I’d choose to work in tech first

I’d start my career tech if I could do it over, because tech allows you to have a more direct impact on clients and customers. It’s also less regulated, which means the industry adopts innovations quicker, pushing you to learn and grow faster. It’s fast-paced, and it enables you to learn hard skills early on.

Consulting is a bit slower and more traditional than tech, and since the focus is on soft skills, you might find it harder to pivot into technical roles later on. However, it’s fantastic for those who want to pursue strategy roles, so it’s not one-size-fits-all.

AI’s disrupting everything. My take is that the closer to a new technology you can be, the better equipped you are for the future — it makes being in tech even more compelling.

Representatives for EY and Meta declined to comment when contacted by Business Insider.

Do you have a story to share about working in prominent industries like Big Tech or consulting? Contact this reporter at ccheong@businessinsider.com.