HDR reviews

Unless you live for your job you will not be considered for promotions. PMs often underbid so they land contracts, then expect employees to donate hours to finish the project without going over budget. Pay raises are barely noticeable, and you have to hound managers to find out what it is. There is no recognition for jobs well done or going above/beyond what should be done. The quarterly awards that are supposed to be for this reason, go to the same people, who live for their jobs. They will ask you to use your personal gear for projects, then not reimburse you if any damage comes to it. While they keep the money in the budget that was supposed to go to buying or renting such gear. If you aren't in the inner circle, you won't advance. There is absolutely no respect for employees. Common courtesy is completely lacking. At monthly NY office meetings you'll hear how great everything is, that all depts are making profit. Everyone but you will forget that when you see your new pay rate.

The company is doing a lot of its growth by acquisition. This is not necessarily always the best fit, and I witnessed more than one of acquired company experience significant pain in the transition from being a small autonomous actor to a piece of HDR. I found middle management to be caught up in meetings. I know this can be a common complaint, but it is not true everywhere, and I have consistently felt (as did others around the table with me, I know) that our time was being wasted. I found it insulting to be on a monthly internal teleconference with hundreds of people, having our time wasted by hearing who had reached their 6-month anniversary with the company, etc. I occasionally find the middle management (and sometimes senior management) to be astonishingly ignorant about the fields we operated in. This can be challenging when it restricts the company's organic growth because they think "there's no business in that area." This was frustrating when I knew that other firms knew there was money to be made in new areas, and were leaving HDR in the dust. I think this speaks to an overall culture of conservatism coming from the headquarters. The resistance to change at HDR may cause problems for the company in the long term. I think the culture at HDR is also one that can easily get stuck on the details at the expense of the business as a whole. I sometimes felt that so much time was being spent attending to the details of the extent to which someone was "making the numbers" that it interfered with the ability of people to actually do their jobs, to sell and execute the work. Making the numbers is obviously important, but I sometimes got the sense that rather than doing good work and letting the numbers follow, there was pressure to make the numbers, and doing good work was secondary.