Below are some of the cons I saw after previously working for a few large national engineering companies. These are in no particular order.
1. Poor work/life balance. For starting employees and even mid/senior level employees there are 2 (0-5 years) to 3 (6-10 years) weeks of leave. There is no specific sick leave, it is all an accruing leave balance. For professional staff, you can make this work when you have a sick kid by working at home. For junior or tech staff, you cant and run out of leave quickly. Professional (salary) staff is expected to put in 50 hours per week on the timesheet or you will get reprimanded. You get a company phone that you will be answering and replying to emails on when you are on vacation. In my experience at a professional company, you get 3 to 4 weeks of vacation plus sick leave. ECS is far behind in this aspect.
2. Project Manager training. Although you get to watch some videos during your orientation, it is woefully inadequate training to start using the management systems such as ALF, IVAN, proposal registration, project registration and other systems. You are basically flying blind at the start. There are supposedly PM training programs, but I never saw or heard of any. It is likely that the home (Chantilly) office has PM support but outlying offices do not.
3. Professionals pay scale doesn't seem professional. At ECS all professionals get a salary and a bonus. Unlike other companies, the bonus is an integral part of your pay. Say at company X they pay $75K plus a bonus if things are outstanding. At ECS the position would pay $61K with a 22.5% bonus . So, part of your salary is deferred to the end of the year. The bonus % can escalate up to 40% or more with seniority, so the bonuses can be huge. However, this creates all kinds of shenanigans as well as regular old hard work at the end of the year to make sure all the billings and collections are done by fiscal year end as this directly affects the bonuses (its based on actual collected monies, not billed). Does this work to get money collected, yes. Does this give the place a "boiler room" feel, yes.
4. IT and accounting systems are very antiquated. ECS is trying to modernize its 90s era systems, but it hasn't happened yet. A webtop called ECS 360 was rolled out that essentially repackaged the same old systems with a new face. The basics of project management systems and cost accounting any large firm has just don't exist at ECS. Starting at the beginning, proposal hours are not tracked to the proposal #, proposals do not get a margin % evaluation, proposals do not have concurrences other than a principal review, etc., etc. Once a proposal becomes a project, there is no real margin %, just a gross margin %. This is because there is no real overhead # factored in at this point (good for the PM) and since there is no project non-billable time allowed in the system, project budget overruns hit the project at billable rates vs. actual cost (bad for the PM). Also, contractors and service providers do not receive POs, much less POs that stipulate line items and quantities.
I may add more to this later.
