ENGEO Reviews

-The overarching problem at ENGEO is groupthink in management. Groupthink is a significant step beyond typical irrational human decision-making; it is when a group makes non-optimal decisions because members of the group are more driven by the need to conform to the group than to conform to rational thinking. Frequently, groupthink will prevent reasonable solutions from even being considered at all, if leaving those ideas off the table helps the cohesiveness of the group. It is more common when a group is centered around a strong personality, like the executive committee is centered around the president of ENGEO. Groupthink leads otherwise intelligent, ethical people to make decisions that conflict with reason and/or moral values to advance the group cause. With groupthink, an “in” and an “out” group will develop, and the “in” group starts to become the “us” that must beat the “out/them” group. In ENGEO’s case, management has made a “them” group that includes members of their own staff for no good reason, as I explain in the following section. -The management and HR culture unnecessarily excludes many excellent team members who are passionate about helping the group. They seem to be particularly bad at working with more introverted people; yet so many intelligent, introverted people at ENGEO kick butt at their jobs everyday despite no support from management, or support so poor it is a hindrance! So many introverted people I knew there were some of the most productive and most helpful people on staff and were obviously integral to ENGEO’s success. Yet management routinely passes over introverted people for promotions, raises, and opportunities, and then tells people they need to be fundamentally different human beings to be successful! The result is that management ends up negating the intrinsic value of AT LEAST a third of the staff, fails to get the most from their potential, and breed stress, tension, and misery. This is a failure of management that harms the company’s morale and productivity, but much more importantly, harms real human beings that don’t deserve it. -ENGEO is a heavily undisciplined work environment when it comes to systems that make groups work efficiently within and between each other. (Most individuals use a lot of discipline to do their jobs, the company would fall apart in a week if people didn’t, but the structures between people and information are usually either barebones, ad-hoc, or non-existent.) I have worked at companies less than half this size that have actual rigorous systems for defining problems, understanding systems, improving processes, and measuring how changes generate a return on investment. Not at ENGEO! You’ll get a principal asking how something is going, an email will get sent and ignored for a few weeks; a follow-up email will generate an enthusiastic but noncommittal reply a few days after that, and then nothing will happen! Wash, rinse, repeat...meanwhile people waste their productivity everyday doing things that could and should have been more streamlined years ago, and the entire company loses out financially due to it. I and others pushed hard to make real positive change at ENGEO, heavily encouraged by field staff who had to work with our procedures and data management systems literally in the trenches. But so little meaningful support came through from management (including, but not limited to, clear decision-making and delegation of authority) that real improvement was impossible. Thanks to the groupthink and the lack of effective procedures to identify good ideas and carry them to implementation, management ends up preventing most of the innovations and improvements that would really help the company turn itself around and go to the next level. -Compensation. ENGEO started me as an entry-level MS staff engineering position, with associated pay. Using the ASCE 2018 salary calculator, I determined that for this region I started at approximately 30% of median salary for an entry-level engineer back in 2015 and received what amounted to cost of living changes in the 3+ years I was there. However, I also changed title and achieved professional licensure in that time. According to ASCE, my value, even kept at that same 30% of median salary level, should have increased 35-40% in those 3 years. But I got 10% in that time! I had been vocally concerned with management about how my salary would change through the title change and licensure, and management assured me I had nothing to worry about and would be fairly compensated. In hindsight, they just lied to my face! PTO is also low, and while they will tout their ESOP plan, it only gets you up to median salaries for this industry and it takes 6 years to vest, so compensation here really is not a good deal, especially if you are someone who develops fast. At ENGEO, your compensation probably won’t start high and is unlikely to keep up with your value.