Dishonesty about lack of Work/Life Balance - Anonymous employee Analysis Group Employee Review

I keep seeing reviews that I think are fake. LOTS of people are repeating things like "work gets busy as with all consulting" and "there are ups and downs in your workload, that's totally normal for consulting, it's not for everyone." However, my experience at AG was very different than these statements would lead you to believe. Yes, it IS normal to have ups and downs in your workload if you're in consulting. It's NOT NORMAL to expect people to be available at all times, for any reason, regardless of whether there is a looming deadline or something time-sensitive happening. It's NOT NORMAL to require your employees to stay connected while abroad on their honeymoon. (I seriously saw this happen twice.) Also not ok: At AG, when you're in a lull and don't have much work to do (since it's the partners' job to bring in the business), they still expect you to sit around until at least 6p every day. Finally, what's really not ok: When the partners weren't bringing in much work in one of the offices and lots of people didn't have much to do, they called us all into a conference room and told us "you better not get used to this. If you're not here late on average at least 3 days a week and at least 2 weekends per month, you're not doing your job." I'm not exaggerating at all - that was very close to verbatim. While compensation is good, it's not good enough to require you to give up all freedom in your schedule. While you work at AG, you will never again know whether you're going to make it to a prior commitment on a Saturday night. They tell you "oh, you can absolutely go to your pre-arranged plans." But that's not really true, because the first time you say "I can't work on Saturday night, I have a thing," they say "ok well what is it?.....ok well can you stay on top of your email and come in on Sunday morning?" And then they remember that you "weren't available" come review time. Please note, potential future employees, this is ANY random Saturday night. They will try to tell you that this kind of thing only happens when a deadline is coming up. That's a lie. Or at least, it's not the full truth, because they will create their own deadlines for "a client has a random question, it's Friday night now, we need it sent back Monday morning."