Jacobs Engineering Reviews

Pros

The benefits are good, earned days off (every second friday for my schedule), free coffee, very active social club, social atmosphere,

Cons

No human resources in the office I worked in which made raising any issues within the department tricky. The computers are so slow that I am at a loss as to why they have not been replaced to increase productivity. There I.T. assistance is slim to nil.

Advice to Senior Management

Project leads should be approving timesheets for their team and at the very least need to be provided with a copy of the timesheets to review. This makes the employees under the lead more accountable.

When an employee speaks to his/her department manager about an issue within the team; the manager should follow through on what was discussed as opposed to doing the opposite and creating an uncomfortable workplace for all of the employees involved.

Pros

Good work life balance, flexible working hours, great training available although you have to push for it, prestigious company, some interesting projects, generally friendly and competent middle management, starting salary above average, some offices have a positive atmosphere, many extremely competent and helpful professionals.

Cons

Laughable or no pay rises, ridiculous corporate activities, management powerless to punish unprofessional behaviour and laziness, poor feedback from line managers, unsatisfactory IT equipment, HR totally incompetent much like everywhere else, some offices deadly quiet.
You can easily be pigeon holed by management and subsequently bored TO DEATH.
There is no structured communication from senior management about the state of the business so redundancies seem to come out of the blue. Beware that your loyalty means nothing.

Advice to Senior Management

Tell us how the business is doing in reality and share feedback from clients with the people who actually did most of the work. Fire people for incompetence rather than hide behind redundancies. Stop tolerating unprofessional behaviour. Simplify the management structure, nobody understands it including the people who are part of it. Introduce bonuses to reward hard workers, not just the managers.

Pros

Good work location and challanging projects

Cons

Lack of training, or desire to educate disipines on how they interface. Strong team attitude, my team against your team.

Pros

I truly enjoy the great personal time off. This is beneficial when you have a personal issue to take care of. Decent benefits. Excellent flexible work schedule.

Cons

Upper management needs to communicate more to all employees to ensure they are aware of what changes might be made.

Advice to Senior Management

The advise I would give to management is to take better care of their employees. People are their greatest assets.

Pros

The flexible work day
the 'billable hours' setup lets me pick how my time is allocated, which seems to result in more personal liberty and less micromanaging by managers

Cons

billable hours means if your work dries up, it can be a problem to find additional jobs where your help is needed

Pros

There are very skilled, talented people there. Initial pay appears to be good, although very minimal (I mean on the scale of roughly 10 cents a year) raises. They are very flexible with hours and personal leave.

Cons

Initially it appeared to be a good career opportunity. After several years with them I have less career opportunities now than I did with my entry level position at my previous employer. Employees are put against each other in annual reviews. There are small groups of people competeing for a small pot of raises and these are the people who review your performance. Over the years I've been told that I do a good job from every client I worked with and professors, but I can't recall a single time that any supervisor in my own company said that I've done something well. Over years it tends to wear on your self esteem and eventually make you wonder if you're even competant in the very field you've passionately loved and invested in your whole life.

Advice to Senior Management

Management and HR pretends to listen but there is no real change. They abuse people, degrade, and humiliate even very talented people in front of others. I'm not talking about myself, I've seen incredibly talented people that I admire and look up to be treated very badly. If you're in "the clique", you can do anything you want. It's very sad.

Pros

Initially the pay was good but having been with the company for over three years and never receiving a raise, the pay is no longer good.

Cons

Management is the biggest joke around. It's acceptable behavior for management to degrade employees in front of others. There is absolutely NO help from HR; promises of "I'll get back to you" never happen. No community within the office and the office does nothing for the employees. So cheap, won't even buy flowers when an employee has a baby or an employee has a relative that passes, but "People are our best asset". IT is so far behind we can't even open things from our clients because we don't have updated software.

Advice to Senior Management

Come into the 21st century in EVERY sense. Clean house in the management and HR department. Abusing people is not acceptable. For a company this size, you need someone to negotiate a better deal with your benefits. Fluor has the exact benefits provider and their rates are MUCH cheaper.

Pros

Some nice colleagues and thats about it.

Cons

Incompetent management who doesn't give a crap. No communication.

This company is a joke, they treat their employees like dirt. No advancement, no raises, no training.

Advice to Senior Management

Learn how to run a real company!

Pros

Great projects, good people in intersting locations.

Cons

Innovation and enterprise are sacrificed on the high altar of "billability", too often project managers produce budgets on schemes using outmoded & out-dated technology and workflows, because they only understand the technology of 20 years ago, and the specific costs of on a project, and not even aware of the recent innovations, or wanting to be aware whilst Jacobs competitors race away.
GVPs, and VPs are worse - living in a bubble of first class air travel and expense account lunches whilst the engineering staff that provide that lifestyle use computers held together with duct tape.

Advice to Senior Management

Stop bragging about how many millions of dollars you are making Jacobs shareholders whilst forcing a pay-freeze and/or redundancy on your workers.

Pros

Great Hours. Worthwhile work and great people to work with. Lots of help and mentors available and the ability to move laterally or vertically.

Cons

Very few cons, being a large company means you can get lost in the mix. Keep doing well and good things will come your way.