HDR reviews

The company is doing a lot of its growth by acquisition. This is not necessarily always the best fit, and I witnessed more than one of acquired company experience significant pain in the transition from being a small autonomous actor to a piece of HDR. I found middle management to be caught up in meetings. I know this can be a common complaint, but it is not true everywhere, and I have consistently felt (as did others around the table with me, I know) that our time was being wasted. I found it insulting to be on a monthly internal teleconference with hundreds of people, having our time wasted by hearing who had reached their 6-month anniversary with the company, etc. I occasionally find the middle management (and sometimes senior management) to be astonishingly ignorant about the fields we operated in. This can be challenging when it restricts the company's organic growth because they think "there's no business in that area." This was frustrating when I knew that other firms knew there was money to be made in new areas, and were leaving HDR in the dust. I think this speaks to an overall culture of conservatism coming from the headquarters. The resistance to change at HDR may cause problems for the company in the long term. I think the culture at HDR is also one that can easily get stuck on the details at the expense of the business as a whole. I sometimes felt that so much time was being spent attending to the details of the extent to which someone was "making the numbers" that it interfered with the ability of people to actually do their jobs, to sell and execute the work. Making the numbers is obviously important, but I sometimes got the sense that rather than doing good work and letting the numbers follow, there was pressure to make the numbers, and doing good work was secondary.

Last year they blocked USB ports and all data transfer websites like drop box and google drive so that no one can take work with them or reference past work which can feel like slavery with no end. On the architecture side there is no culture of promoting within and if you try to move up by taking on new roles and responsibilities this can end in a bad way. Leadership is either hired externally or transferred from the USA. In the past the architecture leadership has been led by an engineer which causes a lot of tension. 80% of HDR's work is TA technical advisory work which will never be built so if you have aspirations of doing professional paper architecture and engineering for a living this is the place to be. This can also create issues with time management because unlike real projects that are executed this work is time and materials billing so you just keep charging your client until they are angry and ask you to stop billing them. Projects can continue on for months or years beyond their scope. There was a reported a case of racism with one of the HR managers who stated that "immigrants will not be good managers because they are too emotional" and "Women do not make good CEO's", after this was reported nothing happened and there was no accountability with senior leadership.