pretty good - Senior Engineer HDR Employee Review

4.0
Mar 8, 2022
Recommend
CEO approval
Business Outlook

Pros

Nice people, not many jerks, most of them pretty smart, get to work on major transportation projects, pays pretty well, offices are pretty nice.

Cons

A new CEO took over in 2017, and he had a much more aggressive agenda than the previous one, which led to problems. They had been doing amazingly well already leading up to that, so he decided to take it up a notch with ridiculously aggressive growth goals. In order to meet the new goals, they focused their efforts mostly on winning huge projects, without balancing the portfolio out with medium and "small" projects (small is relative for HDR). This led to a huge rollercoaster in workload that even spreading work among other offices couldn't help. At one point, there were huge deadlines for three huge projects all at once, so people were working ridiculous hours to meet them, followed by months of not having enough work. People were taking their vacations just to avoid layoffs during the slow period before the next peak. Summers became burnout-busy, and winters became scary-slow.

Explore other reviews about HDR

5.0
Jul 16, 2026
Recommend
CEO approval
Business Outlook

Pros

Growing Company, Employee owned, forward thinking

Cons

No clear defined hierarchy for the company below upper management level.

1.0
Jul 13, 2026
Anonymous employee
Recommend
CEO approval
Business Outlook

Pros

The 401k is good, that's it..

Cons

The main complaint is having to beg for work within the company. They don't have enough work to give you and then complain that your overhead is too high. Communication and training is terrible. I've sent numerous emails to coworkers only to be ignored. You have to keep reaching out for someone to respond to you. The project managers also don't budget the labor for their projects well. They're very tight about how many hours you should spend on an assignment and it's often unreasonable, like read and compare a 600+ page document to a 300+ page technical document in 2 work days. The health insurance sucks too. Things that used to be covered are no longer covered such as basic labs. The insurance carrier is always denying services such as an MRI.

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