Pros
Most of the people there are generally a lot of fun to be around and work with, and there are some genuinely bright, knowledgeable people within the company. The office is in a great location and designed to be fun – beer/wine in the refrigerators, and oftentimes lunch is purchased by the company to be shared on Fridays. Quarterly meetings are very fun, celebratory, and informative, and twice a year they’re designed to turn into a company party. The company is overall very well-run – despite being in the very volatile upstream end of the oil & gas industry, the company trumpets that they have never had to execute any layoffs. (More on that below.) The company’s leadership is very smart about how they invest and handle money, and the leadership has also shown willingness to make personal sacrifices in times where the business/industry are struggling so that others at the company can keep their jobs. At the same time, when things are normal (or better than average), the company compensates very well, both in terms of base pay and bonuses. The benefits are also above-average in quality, and heavily subsidized. If you’re looking to build a career in management consulting within the industry, this is a really good place to get good experience and exposure – and plenty are promoted within the first 1-2 years of working there, and plenty of others are able to leverage their work and projects into roles with other companies.
Cons
As others have mentioned, the work-life balance can become a struggle at times, although that’s not unique to EAG among consulting companies. My bigger concern was with the performance management processes within the company. Unfortunately I was “fired for performance”, but the real issue with that was that it caught me completely off-guard. (Prior to that particular day, I had received numerous performance assessments during my time with the company, and there was never a single element of any of them where I was rated worse than “meeting expectations”.) When I asked for the reasons I was being fired, I was given some feedback on issues that had arisen with my performance, and almost all of them fit into one of two buckets – things I hadn’t heard about in months and thought had long since been resolved, and things that I had straight-up never heard from anyone. The whole thing came as an absolute shock to me, especially after my manager had given me plenty of positive feedback in recent weeks, and in particular had praised me for how well I had responded to (and acted on) constructive feedback. I was never put on a performance improvement plan, nor was there any sort of feedback before that day that indicated that I was potentially in danger of losing my job. It really seemed like it came out of nowhere. What’s worse is that in the time since being let go, I’ve reconnected with multiple other former EAG colleagues who had abruptly “left the company” in recent months, and learned that they had very similar experiences of being “fired for performance” with effectively zero warning or opportunity to redeem themselves. While the company says they’ve never laid anyone off, it seems to me like the preference in managing their workforce is to take advantage of the state’s labor laws and just fire people (for whatever reason, or perhaps none at all), knowing that they won’t have to deal with any sort of resulting lawsuit. It’s disappointing that things are being handled this way for so many employees, to say the least.