The firm exemplifies Peter's Principle at every level and department that I observed. Managers were chronically incompetent as managers and senior leadership was skilled only at wasting manager's time with meetings and conferences. The department manager's I observed were good at managing projects and lousy at managing departments. The entire firm seemed to operate as, more or less, a syndicate of engineers instead of a company. Manager's frequently did not know what projects engineers in their own departments were working on. My department in particular often went months without a department meeting to reevaluate workloads and project demands. It was completely common for some people in a department to be drowning themselves with work while multiple others in the department were billing 10+ hours a week with nothing to do. This was a common occurrence. But, go to these engineers and ask what you could do to help and at best you could get a memo to write or a detail to draw that you could finish before lunch, and then nothing.
The firm also lacks a clear culture of training and teaching from the engineers. For a firm that specializes in such technically complicated fields as building envelope, MEP, and Structural, a short coming in education is detrimental to new hires. I can tell you for a fact that the technicians I worked with at this firm took a more vested interest in educating and training me than any engineer. I could count on one hand the number of times an engineer went out of his way educate me, either with or without prompting. An especially common occurrence for me was to approach an engineer with a question on a task that engineer gave me and for that engineer, instead of explaining the solution to me, to take the task from me to complete themselves because they did not have the time to explain the solution.
I was also uncomfortable with some of the ethical and business practices of the firm. Engineers commonly billed time between two clients and ended the week billing more time than they worked (ie. Billing 50 hours while working 40). Engineers frequently acted vindictively towards contractors by; raising or lowering inspection standards based on the recent "attitude" of the contractor, changing work completed quantities on pay applications so the contractor received less payment, and unnecessarily inconveniencing contractors at every available opportunity. Engineers, including department managers, seemed willing to run a contractor over just to look good for a client, regardless of circumstances.
