Washington River Protection Solutions Employee Reviews about "opportunity"

Pros

The company has a lot of opportunity to experience many facets of engineering, but many of these opportunities are guarded by the 'insiders'. If you work hard and play some of the politics, you will typically be rewarded with opportunities for advancement.

Cons

The company is a prime subcontractor for DOE and with this comes the bureaucratic nightmare. Activities occur slowly in this company, but the company expect fast schedules and to get an abundant amount of work done without the human resources to accomplish the tasks.

Pros

The interns are compensated well (~$23/hr), but the interest level of the projects can vary greatly. Most people work a 4/10 schedule, which would be great except for the fact that there is nothing exciting for young people to do in Tri-Cities. We usually found our respite going to Seattle, Portland or the Cascades. In that regard, work/life balance is acceptable.

Cons

The bureaucratic nature and age of the workforce at the Hanford project in general takes its toll on the work culture at WRPS. The Hanford clean-up project has provided thousands of stable high-paying jobs to the area, which initially sounds like a positive thing. But the double-edged sword is that when (if ever) the clean-up is complete, most of those jobs presumably come to an end. So why would any current employee (especially older with a family) want to push for finishing the project quickly and work toward the end of their job? The end result is an unnecessary amount of red-tape that prevents meaningful work from being accomplished while continually pushing back deadlines. The other result is a stodgy work culture, which is unappealing if you're an aspiring young engineer. My advice would be that WRPS isn't a great place to start your career unless you are a graduate with a GPA < 3.0 and this is all you can get for the time being. If you want to learn transferable engineering skills and become a better and more versatile engineer, go work for a company in industry that actually has the opportunity for professional development; you can always come back to WRPS later (b/c the Hanford clean-up won't finish in our lifetimes), but staying at WRPS will make it difficult to get anywhere else.

Pros

- The work itself is actually very interesting and can offer some good growth opportunities to expand professional skills and knowledge. - The pay especially for folks fresh from school with only a bachelors degree and no or minimal work experience is usually higher than average for most fields vs. what the private and other State and Federal government agencies pay. - Benefits, vacation hours, and paid holidays are decent and within normal range. - Majority of the general employees are knowledgeable, well educated, and very interesting to work with. - Once in the DOE-EM complex system, its usually not difficult to create the network resources and access needed to jump around the different DOE sites and contractors.

Cons

- There is absolutely zero career training or professional development offered and minimal tuition reimbursement available (mostly reserved for masters, little support for bachelors or doctorate). - Typically work will be assigned with zero mentoring or training so for people that aren't good or don't enjoy the challenge this approach presents can often find working here to be exceedingly stressful. Oh, and like all government jobs, you will be assigned to do the work of multiple full-time employees since most groups are under-staffed, sometimes horrifically so due to the high turnover rate. - Can serve as a good stepping for early and mid-career professionals, but other than experience you gain on-the-job, no advancement to career or professional knowledge will be made so its best not to work here more than 5 years, most people prefer not to exceed 3 and a lot of people, especially those new to this type of work, have a hard time even making it through their first year. - Job is serving as a contractor to US DOE EM Division; so to 'escape' the DOE world after entering if you want to jump back to the private sector or non-government work can sometimes be difficult as its not uncommon for ex-employees from here to find they've been black-balled from being hired due to the reputation the company and this particular DOE site has outside the DOE-EM Complex. - It is both contractor work and government work, which means congressional funding shenanigans do adversely impact workers and lay-offs are common. Its also an exceedingly stressful and difficult place to work just before, during, and immediately after a change in the prime contracts and contractors. - There is minimal promotional opportunity to lead or supervisor positions, and for the most part, zero promotion potential to a management position. Most lead positions, especially management, are nearly universally filled by corporate folks. The company also no longer supports in-grade promotions (so other than rare and minimal salary bumps which in the past 10 years, have not even kept up with cost of living or the increases in our insurance premiums, so do not expect your salary or grade to ever truly increase after hiring unless you jump to another job or company). - Since management is comprised of corporate employees brought in from outside the area that are present only for a short span of time (2 years max typically) they have no personal or professional investment, or interest in investing in or supporting, their inherited, local employees (i.e. anyone who is not corporate). So their attitudes and behaviors are generally poor and often this results in them neglecting and abusing most of the general employees, so retaliation and a hostile work environment and management team is not un-common.

Pros

Positive atmosphere in town (I didn't work on site), fascinating work, lots of networking opportunity for a student

Cons

Projects tend to move very slowly