Pros
My supervisor provided detailed explanations on technical matters and various technologies. The half a day on Friday was a nice perk.
Cons
Hiring is a huge issue here where they don't hire enough people to support the heavy workload, which leads to burnout. However, when they do hire it involves bringing in new young engineers either straight out of school or they have a couple of years of experience. The firm is setup to be too top and bottom heavy with no reasonable spread in the middle. This results in being overworked if you are in the 5-10 year mark in terms of experience or if you are a PM. The other issue is that poor performers are not held accountable. I do not understand how a company wants to preach excellence when it has company wide issues of poor performers not being held accountable (based on a company wide survey). The other thing is MBI is very cheap and does not support major water industry organizational participation such as WEF or AWWA. You can get face time with potential new clients, make contacts for potential hiring opportunities at MBI, and attend career fairs at the national conferences for these organizations to have access to some really great talent. Nonetheless, this company is not built to support professionals that have an interest in making a name for themselves in the Water Industry. By the way, don't fall for the narrative that they are number 10 in ENR water rankings, which is related to conveyance and has nothing to do with treatment. No disrespect, but moving water and wastewater is nothing special or difficult and MBI does a huge amount of pipeline work. In reality a lot of much smaller firms do the same work and can do it even better than MBI. Also, the budgets are always in peril. The drafted scope and budgets are always coming up short somehow, and even sometimes I've seen it as low as 3-5% of construction cost estimates (our own estimates that we developed). This is a major discrepancy because staff is pressured to stay efficient, which is not doable under these constraints. At the end of the day a lot of unpaid OT is donated due to poorly constructed budgets. Another striking concern I noticed during one of our weekly department meetings for the Water/Wastewater group is that we were happy that we were in the middle in terms of cost for a submitted project proposal. Two firms were on the higher end of the spectrum with minimal differences between their costs while MBI (ours) was in the middle and the lowest was attributed to another firm. The department manager noted that this is where we want to be; in the middle. To me, I saw that we are under budgeting, which was par the course for many of the projects that I had to work on. If you are two of the outlier firms on a proposal, then that signals to me that the PMs are under budgeting to win the work. Keep in mind that PMs do not account for the amount of training (time spent by PMs and project engineers) that has to go into these projects when dealing with the younger (0-3 yrs experienced professionals) engineers. There has to be some cushion for those items. The other issue is that there is poor training and now they are trying to offer training requirements on items of interest using the Baker training modules, which are very poor. To be honest, if you want to work here because it is the only option, then put in your time until you find a better situation, which there are plenty in my opinion.
