Jacobs Engineering Reviews in Houston, TX Area

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

Everyone is treated with respect.

Cons

Benefits have cost more and salary has stayed the same, feels like penalty vs reward.

Advice to Senior Management

Take care of the little people, they carry you forward.

Pros

Good pay, good people, good location, lots of focus on safety (almost to the point of being annoying)

Cons

Easy to fall into a routine depending on your job, not particularly exciting work, interfacing with the civil/government side of things can be annoying, but is necessary

Pros

It is not a job that will have you put in extra hours, or force you to take work home. The position is hourly, so you get paid for the work you do. It is a generally lax atmosphere, so you are not put to task very often. Good place for an easy, steady paycheck that you can get without exerting yourself or having to ever even use your brain.

Cons

If you are looking to build a career, and learn new skills, this is not the place to do it. They do a lot of good work in engineering, and are cutting edge, but the support departments like IT and Accounting are largely just around to do the bare minimum. This is not a good place to be if you are not in the core departments. Also, the politics will get to you. That is a guarantee.

Advice to Senior Management

If you are going to hire top talent, do not put them to waste by making them work menial tasks. Hire interns for that.

Pros

9 hour days with every other Friday off.

Cons

Nepotism and favoritism run rampant in the IT department in Houston. If you get hired in IT and you are not one of the few that make it into "the club", you won't last long. Management doesn't know the meaning of honesty or fairness. Benefits are well below average for a large company in Houston. No bonuses of any kind here, not even a Christmas party.

Advice to Senior Management

Hire all new IT managers in the Houston office. Give back more to your employees and they will be happier and more productive.

Pros

ESC contract is the engineering contract for NASA Johnson Space Center. If you are lucky, you get to work on pretty cool stuff. It is exciting and challenging with very interesting problems to solve. I really enjoy my time there. People are great and direct line manager is very flexible.

Cons

You can get stuck in a hole where you are too specialized to go anywhere else and your skills can sometimes become obselete.
Old people with 1960's mentality sometimes, very hard for generation Y.

Advice to Senior Management

Think about career development for the younger folks or you will not be able to keep them for long!

Pros

- good people to work with
- well known employer
- international assignments

Cons

- litte training
- occassional unreasonable manhours
- growth opportunities

Advice to Senior Management

- Good job of keeping the stock value
- Retain employees

Pros

Great, personable friendly people to work with and they have a lot of things in place in tended to make it a great work experience.

Cons

Very low moral right now and managements attitude is "well at least you still have a job." There is a lack of clear communication for major things occuring in the company and rumors from others outside the company is usually better information then what we get. A salary freeze since September 2008. where is the incentive for being a hard worker?

Advice to Senior Management

If you are going to issue a Company wide review program that promises a raise to be issued on a certain date at least acknowledge it. It doesn't matter if you plan on issuing any or not, if you set the date don't let it pass with out a word. Your employee's aren't stupid we understand how tight the economy is in the industry right now but by not even acknowledging the event makes it look like you are trying to pull a fast one on us hoping we don't notice.

Pros

Jacobs pays well. The ppl are Texas friendly. They are safety aware.

Cons

They have outsourced over half of all positions to india. Management is terrible They are all so fearful of losing their jobs, they will not make a move without cautiously seeking upper management approval. The approval process takes forever. Creativity is stiffled.

Advice to Senior Management

Quit being all about the shareholders and start caring about your employees

Pros

Very good company to work as far as putting family first. Very understanding when they're family issues that you need to take care of.

Cons

Can't trust them. They will lay you off no matter how loyal you are or how long you have been employed. I've seen many a layoff over the years that I worked there. Never mattered on how many years of service or how good of a worker they are. They can very easily dismiss you. I was employed with them for 18 years. Called me one day and said today is your last day. Job was outsourced to India and they would like for me to stay until the transition is complete. No thank you.!

Advice to Senior Management

They should not allow people from another country to come in and mythodically take American jobs back to their country, and I believe they should consider length of service and loyalty before they easily lay someone off. Also, they need to get rid of their slogan..."people are our greatest asset"...Clearly they are not.