Hi there, going to an interview at Booz, wondered what the culture was like - are they nice people to work with, and are they making any money and if so in which industry areas?Also struggling to understand size and shape of UK practice and how it relates to Europe.Cannot seem to find anyone who has ever worked for them to talk to.

In my experience:Nice people for the most part. A couple of really selfish and powerful ones that ruin it for everyone else however. You will find the odd diamond amongst the rough there, however. Pressure cooker environment. Gotta have one eye open all the time. Good pay, good projects. If you start at a junior level, they'll expect you to leave after 2 years to do an MBA or go into industry, hence not great for stability and getting a mortgage. I found the hours unbearable. After a few years, you may not have any friends left because of the demands of the job plus travel. Intellectually very good people to work with.

Thanks for your messageHow did you find the support services, from what I can make out there is a higher % of support staff to alternative practices, wondered if that made a difference to people on the front line?

My personal opinion: Support staff are nice people but not all that helpful. They have a very good document production unit that can do a lot of your powerpoint fiddling for you. Results vary depending on who you use. IT department was OK but the kit you got to some extend depended on who you knew in the IT dept. Information resource dept was virtually useless, often I would give them an urgent job and they would tell me they would work on it straight away, then I would phone back 5 mins later to say something I forgot only to be told they were out at lunch. Recruitment team is great. Staffing dept is poor, if you end up using them to get staffed on projects you might as well be using monster.com. Secretaries were friendly enough but not very proactive, then again I wasn't really senior enough to be allocated one. Most of the time you had to do your own flight bookings etc. This was outsourced and a pretty good service. Basically don't expect to have a whole army of support staff behind you, you will have the document production unit which is the most helpful, but if you really need to get things done then often you're better off just doing it yourself.

Don't supose you want to tell me about the pain in the a** Partners - for me key to consulting success has always been about which coat tails your hanging onto?

well i don't feel comfortable going into specifics, but basically they fall into a couple of categories:1. the nice ones. the ones who give you interesting work and let you get on with it, then give you a good review for a job well done. thankfully, these are the most successful ones.2. the task masters. they'll make you work all night, and then some more. you just worked 5 nights in a row to produce a report that's really good? well nothing's ever good enough for these guys, so expect to spend the next 5 nights re-writing it again.3. the drifters. just as you get to know them, *poof* they've disappeared off to singapore for the next 5 years. leaves you feeling like you've wasted a load of time building a relationship with them.4. the egotists. if you bump into them in the corridor, you might as well step to one side and bow at them - cuz that's pretty much what they're probably expecting. these are the sort that you might for instance hear joking about firing a junior.on average i quite liked the partners there actually, they're a good bunch but i for one found that there were some people who you just had to stay away from if you wanted to avoid a difficult time.