Now, the elephants in the room:
Number one:
You will be paid on average 25% LESS than any other VDC role while at Hensel Phelps.
This pay cut is warranted by management through the profit sharing program, but as I stated above you will not see significant vesting into this program until 10+ years of tenure at HP.
In the modern world, technology professionals are not even staying 24 months at a company, and jumping ship for significant raises as the labor market in this segment is extremely competitive. HP seemingly won't budge on this and will not only pay you less than other VDC professionals, but will not give you significant raises and expects you to tenure at the company for the rest of your career. This is extremely unrealistic, and very problematic.
And they wonder why hiring for VDC is so difficult? Even Tesla is paying VDC professional directly to work on their construction projects.
Number two:
HP struggles to adopt new technology the pace it needs to.
The company culture is full of "good 'ol boys" who have had their job and way of life secured through the profit sharing program. The systemic problem for middle management at HP is that they can never make more money for the company through use of new technology. Everyone is concerned about bottom line, and saving every penny. Technology that has the power to save millions of dollars (or prevents series liability) on projects gets ignored or deemed too expensive because project managers would rather save a few thousand dollars up front. This also means they don't have to learn about the tech, and justify it to their project owners.
This kind of behavior is directly incentivized through the profit sharing program. Specifically at upper management levels where these types of decisions have little impact on those individuals directly, but will financially benefit their profit sharing checks.
I found during my time at HP, there was very little respect among staff regarding the technology that was used on many projects. Even during times when that same technology saved the projects collectively from lawsuits, or millions of dollars in change orders.
Number Three:
Work life balance is absolutely backwards at HP. It's unironically become a meme among the staff to joke about how much they work and with ZERO overtime adjustments. It was common for me to work 60 hours in a week, and some of my VDC colleagues on the project teams were pushing 80 hours in a week.
While working at HP I was required to be available and traveling to other projects in the district. This would include many weekends where I would need to drive for an entire day just to arrive and find out that the project did not prepare the necessary items to complete laser scanning.
During said travel, I would frequently be questioned about my expensed meals, and other necessary expenses. I was even asked to use my own vehicle for travel, and then I had to struggle with upper management to get compensated for the mileage.
I would almost always have to work late during the week, and mostly because the BIM activities I was involved in were secondary to the project's construction schedule. Many times I felt the management at the project level simply didn't care about the critical BIM activities on their site, and would often lapse their responsibilities as related, and it would take intervention at the district management level to put a stop to this. (Of course this made me very hated among project staff)
Finally,
The financial incentives at this company are completely backwards. As I mentioned above project management are incentivized to save pennies upfront when negotiating the contracts with the owners. This is the only way HP makes a profit, is cutting costs.
Boy is HP good at cutting cost! Underpaid staff, bottom dollar sub contractors, reluctant technology implementation, no overtime compensation, and the majority of field work is shoved onto the backs of employees who don't even get officially trained except once a year (Field Engineer Role).
The final nail in the coffin for me was the retirement program. HP sets up a very generous 15% contribution on top of your salary that gets dumped directly into your 401k account. The problem is that this money does not vest fully until 6 years later. Additionally, it's 2021 and the brokerage they use doesn't let it's users pick individual securities, and has no options for funds to be transferred until you leave the company (and they are fully vested).
This made me miss out on extreme gains in the markets I chose to invest in outside of my HP account. Ultimately made this generous 15% contribution useless to me. Meanwhile, the HP health savings plan did not have these restrictions and I was able to grow my account balance significantly through investing.
In conclusion:
HP might be one of the best contractors to work for out there, but if you have VDC skills, you're better off getting a job modeling as a mechanical engineer in another industry. This company (and others in the industry) are not setup properly for the competitive tech labor market.
As the construction process rapidly becomes 99% digital, and the physical work role of the GC becomes minuscule, how will HP continue to support the thousands of employees on their profit plan that don't have VDC skills? Furthermore, how will HP shake the terrible work life balance and culture issues?
If HP is to survive the coming decades, they must begin to make it more attractive for technical talent to work for them, and they must get rid of the awful incentive structure the HP profit sharing plan provides. The talent will only continue to stay away from VDC roles, and the profit plan will continue to parasitically drain the company while it's constituents are incentivized to keep things going exactly the same as they have been for the last century.
"We've always done it this way"
And I guess you always will.
