Pros
For the last 25-30 years the company had some pretty good staff and the office environment lent itself to personal growth within the departments and positions. The CEI department that handles FDOT inspections is still a growing department and consistantly brings work in even in spite of the Engineering and Surveying departments nearing zero workload. There is a good close-knit group of employees in the various departments that have been with the company through thick and thin and they all seem like genuine people. IT people do thier best to help with the limitations of the hardware. The office environment is generally pretty loose and informal.
Cons
The company has slowly languished since the economic bust with no clear direction as how to keep afloat. Top talent across the company started to leave, either by retirement or in the case of younger employees, by taking positions elsewhere. With those departures the client list of the company shrank and with no clear business strategy no new clients were brought in and older clients were not retained. Attempts to try to jump into new avenues of work with larger cleints or public sectors are unsucessful as the marketing aspects of the company do not lay the ground work for reaching goals. Marketing has been generally haphazard without clear goals or direction. Management does not believe in strengthening current loyal employees and instead brings in other subs on a regular basis at higher payrates than the employees. Work weeks, benefits and salaries are being cut to allow that and many times the unhandled work load of the subs fall on the employees whom are never credited for thier roles. Micro-managed "billability" models are strictly adhered to and are impossible to meet with the companies workload and expectations. Management often doesn't agree on how employee times are spent. Often an employee will get conflicting direction on how to handle a project budget. Management will often hold numerous non-billable meetings in a week thereby making the billable percentage unattainable and then expect you to answer for your non-billable time the next week. Management has been short-sighted on technology updates which is causing issues. Most computers are still running Windows 2000. AutoCAD is still only on 2004 and their Microstation is still on the 1995 version. This is already having an affect on functionality and with the ageing server it is only a matter of time before large scale and expensive improvements will need to be made.