Pros
They try to match projects close to people's home locations. Most of the senior/principal engineers are good to work for. Utilization isn't emphasized, but they will force you to get 40 billable hours or take PTO. Health benefits are platinum plan fully employer supported. Reputation is strong locally, will look good on resumé. Decent reimbursement with little oversight.
Cons
Director can be very toxic, often yells at employees in the office unprofessionally. Will drag other employees into yelling sessions if they copied your work. Your mistakes can be brought up months later if someone copies them. Even if you're not being yelled at it can be jarring. Criticism is very inconsistent. Pay is low for geologists. Engineers appear to be paid better. No retirement program to speak of. They "can elect" to contribute to a SEP-IRA but there's no transparency on how that works. Last year my contribution was $3K. Not being to contribute to a 401K on your own is a big weakness. No direct deposit. Checks have been lost in the mail. I've worked for smaller companies that did have direct deposit. Projects are small residential and can be boring. 10 hour infiltration projects, pin piles, hand borings, rammed aggregate pier observation, etc. Few long projects. Training is limited. New hires are thrown onto projects with little help and are asked to do project management tasks. Common procedures are not communicated, there is no training documentation files. Office is cliquish which is hard for such a small company. They recalled everyone into the office which is hard for long commuters (which most are because Seattle is HCOL). Mileage is strictly monitored but most workers cheat it anyway. It's a constant issue. They have 1 or 2 licenses for critical work programs, so being able to do certain tasks at certain times can be challenging. Office has no conference room. People make calls at all times and volumes. There are a lot of bodily noises, mostly coughing and belching that are very distracting. You'll want head phones, although that interferes with learning in the office. There is no dedicated IT staff, different employees are assigned to different tasks outside their core function. Only one admin staff, but she is great. Equipment room gets messy and crowded. Parking is limited to 5 spots in a lot and then you'll need to find street parking with can be time consuming. There aren't standard report templates, they'll tell you to copy a report from a similar project. Each principal has a preferred style/aesthetic. Errors from those templates and from you're own contribution will concatenate and if you ever do get reviewed can lead to a toxic session. Similarly, review for some is very superficial. Reports are sent out with errors after printing to pdf and then those reports are copied and the problem gets worse. Need an office manager to handle templates. Projects are assigned in a free for all over teams (although Teams is utilized in no other way). Certain people work better with certain others, will preferentially offer projects to their favorites which is how the cliques form. If you don't have project managers who like you you'll get undesirable projects that no one wants. Slow times can lead to people competing for hours. A lot of long tenured employees have left in the last 2 years, over 25% of the company for higher paying jobs. Other long time employees claimed they didn't receive raises that beat rising COL. A material mistake in a report by an employee last year was deducted from the employee bonus pool to the tune of $25K. Your bonus is held hostage to others mistakes. Should be built into bids and insurance. $40 reimbursement for phones a month. Most other companies have a higher amount. Old boy attitudes are prevalent amongst some. They will approve PTO and then ask you to work anyway. Just make yourself unavailable to work. Licensing for geologists is never discussed. If that's a career goal you'll need to do it independently, although you will be working for licensed geos and PEs.