Good staff, excellent projects, excessive hours, somewhat old-fashioned management
Pros
I joined BuroHappold's London office in April 2015 as a Graduate Engineer, was promoted to Engineer in January 2017 and remained there until December 2017. I left to pursue a different career. The most positive aspects of life at BuroHappold (for me) were: - I worked on interesting and varied projects, most of which would have looked excellent on my CV had I continued a career in engineering. - Much of the staff are excellent - a lot of very talented, intelligent and thoughtful people work at BH. I made plenty of friends here and was fortunate to learn a lot from my colleagues. - Career prospects - it was clear that had I pursued this career, the opportunities and support were there. - Responsibility - even as a graduate, a lot of responsibility was handed to me and a lot of faith was put in my skills and abilities. This is empowering.
Cons
- The most prominent negative I encountered was the working hours. I was often given far too much work to complete within normal hours, and this was not uncommon for my colleagues. Complaints about overwork were often unheard or sated by managers with "I am also overworked, just like you", which is not a valid argument to make to employees. I suspect the reason is that BH is trying to compete with far larger design consultancies, and is bidding too low for very risky projects. I often felt that I was personally donating the % profit on projects with my free time in evenings. It was not uncommon for me to stay until 8/9/10pm every weekday for several weeks in a row. - The C-Suite / upper management were, I felt, a little out of touch with the use of modern technology. Given that a design consultancy's work is almost entirely completed using various engineering software, there was no real support within the Cities division to train people or push our use of technology in a beneficial direction. The management gave a lot of talk about a drive to get engineers coding, but I never saw any evidence of this. To their credit, I believe the Buildings division was far more open-minded than Cities in this respect.
