PBS Engineering and Environmental Reviews

- Recent acquisition have sparked some big changes that feel pretty dehumanizing to workers. - New expectations are unrealistic, and mass layoffs are being done without notice or severance on the day insurance is expiring. - Layoffs have disproportionately been hitting women and minorities. My overall sense that the company's DEI policies are lip service to mask a lack of follow-through from leadership. - There is an extreme lack of women and minorities in engineering relative to a lot of other companies, which was not helped by recent lay-offs. I've seen some bad behavior go un addressed, which is likely contributing to poor inclusivity metrics. For example, a female engineer was called pet names (such as "love") by her supervisor on her first day, which seemed to make her uncomfortable. - Ongoing changes seem to be making career development and training difficult or impossible.

Said there would be no lay-offs after Aquisition by APEX. PBS says they're concerned about 'disrupting' and making sure everyone is on the same page during the transition. Meanwhile people are being layed-off everyday without notice or severence. They are pretending this isn't obvious to other employees. A coordinated company that say things like "We are employee driven/people first" would at least hold off for optics reasons. I've seen them walk out an employee of 20 years who with 1 other person supported Engineering standards for 300 employees. They replace her with someone much younger without any apparent experience in the topic. Brutally fired 3 employees in 1 office the same day. We thought this was confined to the Engineering dept, But It's clearly across the board now. And this - after the client base was made national and opportunities for work abound. What does that communicate to your people? If you, like many engineers and science-majors are autistic or have those traits this company will break you. There is a tone-death focus on sociality and communication skills over job skills and performance, There is antiquated views on being physically in the office and remote work is frowned upon. PBS has a solid footing in PNW market sectors and many good people and some excellent aspirations on paper. Ultimately though it's a small corporation clumsily doing corporate things. If you are mid-level you likely will be given no direction or growth path, You'll be allowed to improve processes and take authority and then be shut out from decisions. Or have work you've done be made useless by upper-management changing course on a whim. There appears to be an anxiety around protecting those that are shareholders (a 50ish person cabal) against those that aren't. You probably shouldn't work here unless you're fresh out of college and need experience - you can learn a lot also. You are their main hiring demographic after all! at least for Engineering anyway.