Pros
My immediate coworkers were genuinely great: collaborative, smart, easy to work with. Remote flexibility is a real perk, and occasional interesting projects do cross your desk. If you land on the right team, the day-to-day can be enjoyable enough to make you forget the bigger picture for a while.
Cons
The bigger picture is bleak. SWCA is an environmental consulting firm that doesn't seem to care much about the environment. They go wherever the money is, which overwhelmingly means fossil fuel and mining clients. The vast majority of your time will be spent on soul-sucking, world-destroying projects for a company with no spine and no principles. The compensation structure is designed to make you poorer over time. Raises were below inflation every year I was there, so after three years I was making less in real dollars than when I started, despite being good at my job, with consistently positive biannual reviews and positive feedback from collaborators outside of my team. There's no 401k match, and they point to the ESOP instead, which has a six-year vesting period and measly contributions at that. The employee ownership thing reads like a PR move more than a real benefit. Meanwhile, you're expected to be available outside business hours, on call, despite being paid well below market rate. The time off policy is insulting, especially for experienced hires. I came in with many years of experience and got two weeks of vacation accrued week by week, which meant I couldn't take any real time off for nearly a year. I missed family events and trips and worked closely around the holidays the whole time I was there because of an outdated PTO structure that tells you everything you need to know about how much the company values your life outside of work. Management is obsessed with your billable hours ratio and will come down on you for overhead time that's entirely outside your control from training, gaps between available work (which is just the natural pace of project flow in this field), administrative tasks, etc. At the same time, nobody wants to pay overhead to actually develop you professionally. They won't invest in training, then hold it against you when you don't have certain skills. I didn't meaningfully grow as a professional in my entire time here, and nobody cared whether I did.
