CDM Smith Environmental Engineer/Manager reviews

Communication sometimes lacking from middle management. Quality assurance by middle management sometimes lacking. Standard types of complaints about large consulting firms. Mentoring processes needed strengthening.

1. CDM is not lack of technically sound engineers and resources, unfortunately, lots of projects still failed even when the projects had enough budget and time to execute. Budgets are always low or burned faster than anyone knows. In no doubt, this is in large part due to the poor project planning and/or management. 2. When project suffers from deadline and budget problems, employees have to either sacrifice work-life balance by working overtime without pay or risk becoming the PM's scapegoat and getting a bad annual review. 3. At CDM, project quality management is just a joke: as long as you finished the project within budget and deadline you are gold. Let the clients and operators worry about the problems later. 4. Lots of senior level engineers like playing blaming games and creating fame for themselves to secure their jobs and get promoted. Don't know if they were born that way or became that way after being with CDM for too long (being forced by the environment). 5. Some company 'gurus' in certain specialty areas are too busy to do any real project work: going to conferences and traveling around the country to attend meetings seem to be a lot more fun that sitting at the desk every day.