Pros
As a 25+ year employee with CH2M HILL, it's interesting to read some of the complaints in these reviews. I recognize that some may believe my experience is mine alone, but I've seen enough over the decades here to know it's more than that. In short, this company is a very good employer. Pay and benefits are quite satisfactory. Freedom to do what I want within the company's structure is quite good -- including work-life balance. While it's true overheads have been cut over time, such is the way of most all businesses except those in industries with extraordinarily high margins. Lastly, I had to chuckle when I read comments disparaging the employee ownership program. The stock at CH2M HILL (available only to employees) has performed far better than its publicly-traded peers over the past decade and has increased in value nearly 1200% (from $4.31 to $55.71) over the past decade. You would have to look long and hard to find comparable performance. It has helped finance my children's college educations as well as funded (in part) my burgeoning 401K (supplemented by rather generous employer matches). I really can't see how one could complain.
Cons
The firm has grown substantially over the years and now numbers some 30,000 employees, a third of which are outside the U.S. The culture here has evolved as well, and is of course (given the size of the firm) less family-like than it was, say, in the early 1980s. My biggest complaints are three: 1. The firm has set up procedures and processes meant to be suitable for delivering projects as large in size as several billion USD. It then applies many of those processes and expectations to projects less than $100K USD in size. That creates headaches for project managers and increases bureaucracy. Making more processes scalable would yield big benefits in both speed and reducing PM frustration. 2. The firm rewards its entrepreneurial employees to a greater degree than "worker bees" who help deliver projects yet don't bring in work or build client relationships that generate their own opportunities. Consequently, staff who lack the aptitude or opportunity to grow client relationships may be treated less well, may see fewer opportunities, and may feel less "in charge" of their careers than those who don't. I suspect that situation is the root of many of the complaints I see on this site. 3. As the corporate office in metro Denver has grown, I sense that ideas that are brewed up in Denver and tested at that location are deployed without really understanding how they may (or may not) work well at other locations. In other words, groupthink at corporate is becoming more evident and irritating over time. Just because a policy or process makes someone's job at the corporate office easier, doesn't necessarily mean it's welcome, workable, or beneficial to the firm's far-flung project teams and their clients.
