Don't drink the Kool-aid - Anonymous employee Burns & McDonnell Employee Review

Burns & McDonnell (CULT)ure – The Kool-Aid is pretty potent... I personally hated the taste. Not challenging – Burns and McDonnell needs to remove “engineering” from their name. It’s not engineering… Quite frankly they are stealing great talent and wasting it. Especially the people who work in the Transmission Department. An engineering degree should not be required to do that mindless work. Instead of engineer as a title they should be called “Parts pickers”. I’ve heard that term be used by upper management to describe the work T-line folks do. All it would require to do transmission line design would be showing people how to push the buttons in PLS CADD. The older generation have already accepted their fate in that department, but the young people need to realize they have so much more to offer to the world other than PLS CADD. Brilliant minds being put to rest when they accept their offer from Burns & McDonnell. If you are reading this and defending that PLS CADD work is engineering, you’re lying to yourself, stop. The young people here working to become a PE are at an extreme disadvantage because the work is not engineering. Young people feel stuck because they have been doing monotonous tasks that will not transfer elsewhere and they have been brainwashed to think that BMcD is “the best place to work”. “Flex Time” – Commuting in Houston can be very frustrating to say the least, so the idea of having flex time is great. Don’t let BMcD Houston let you believe that they have flex time, because it doesn’t exist. They will have you schedule your clock in/clock out time. ESOP – This is the carrot on the stick everyone is chasing. This is a very good chunk of cash you get to appreciate after Burns & McDonnell has worked you into the ground, and you get to retire. Pretty much everyone that works here is working to retire, because work/life balance doesn’t really exist. So if you don’t really want to enjoy your life until retirement, BMcD is the place for you! Not to mention you’ve got to have some kind of goal to become vested with BMcD, because it’s literally the most boring work I’ve ever had to do. Can you count, color, draw lines, and jump when someone says jump? Yes? Congrats you’re a BMcD “engineer”. BMcD needs to be more transparent about who is really getting the ESOP money. I was talking to a senior engineer who was lead to believe when he started that he would have a specific amount in his ESOP by year 10, but conveyed that after doing the math there would be nowhere near that much in his account. The company is growing at a rapid pace and the shares are being distributed throughout. Sure, people will retire and have their shares distributed, but people are coming in much faster than people are retiring. Their smoke and mirrors act is pretty convincing. Employee owned – Mix this with the ESOP and you have the perfect brainwashing concoction. Some easily swayed people will feel EMPOWERED to be an employee owner, so BMcD takes advantage of this and works them into the ground. BMcD reaps the benefits of their brainwashed, overworked, and underpaid employees by billing them out at 3x their hourly wage. Literally feels like legal slavery. People here have donated their life to BMcD, and it blows my mind. I swear people here have some sort of “Stockholm Syndrome”, the concept in criminology where hostages express empathy and sympathy and have positive feelings toward their captors, sometimes to the point of defending and identifying with their captors. Most employees here I believe are completely brainwashed into thinking this is the best place to work and feel they are trapped. Yes, you’re an employee owner, but do you have any say in anything? You have some stock… woohoo. You’re still just a number… Employee end of year appraisal – This is the time where you find out if your bonus increased from the previous year. This will be your only time throughout the year you will hear how well you’re doing your job. In my opinion this is just an excuse for poor management. The annual review is a joke and is a tool to build an artificial record of inadequacies so that employees have little to stand on should they become terminated. If termination is not an option management can take away your deferred compensation they call a “bonus” if you’re not performing to their expectations around the time of the appraisal. Instead of giving constructive criticism throughout the year they would rather just gather evidence against you. This leads me to my favorite thing Burns & McDonnell does is the “Steamroll Tactic” if they feel you’re not doing something they like. The “Steamroll Tactic” is a special type of management Burns & McDonnell LOVES and is just how it sounds, they schedule a meeting without you knowing and call you in to steamroll you. They have already made up their mind about why they called you in, so any rebuttal you have to defend yourself doesn’t really matter. Office politics and employee status play a huge role in why these meetings happen. The people above you are never wrong… Work/Life Balance – As mentioned above…. It doesn’t exist. Recently Houston had some unexpected flooding that happened over the weekend. This caused many people to have to miss coming to work, because they simply couldn’t physically get there. If you didn’t have your laptop with you at home, then it was kind of wasted time. Instead of closing down the office completely (like most companies did) BMcD had a come in at your own risk type of attitude (**ironic that they preach safety. Safety is a concern unless it affects the bottom line**). I talked to a person who totaled their car trying to make it into work… Any hours you missed you were expected to make them up. During a staff meeting the presenter stated something along the lines of “You should be taking your computer home anyway over the weekend, like me…. I answer important emails over the weekend”. So basically they expect you to work over the weekend as well. BMcD wants to control every aspect of your life. You’re an employee owner, so you should feel empowered to go the extra mile for the client! What a joke. Work should be a means of living, work should not be your life. A fellow employee recently had a close family member pass away, and a PM during a meeting only a couple days after it happened said “I hope ____ comes back Monday”. The lack of empathy is sickening, and honestly fits right with how BMcD treats their employees. The client and “billability” are the most important things. “Billability”, you’ll grow to hate this word. BMcD will have countless meetings about “Billability”, and are those meetings billable? No… So they will preach billability while you’re not billable. BMcD will hold 1.5 hour long meetings preaching billability, and you’re expected to make up this time. Will management make up the time? No, because they have to budget “admin time” into their timesheet. They want you to bust your rear end to maintain high billability. “You’re responsible for your billability” is a quote you’ll hear a lot…. So you mean to tell me that it’s my fault for doing the numerous proposals that aren’t billable? Most of the proposals are a waste of time because BMcD will probably not get the work, because they are too expensive. I understand why billability is important, because that’s the only way BMcD makes money. In the end this is probably the only thing BMcD cares about is your billability. Being Pigeonholed - Moving laterally in BMcD is not something that is in BMcD’s best interest. If you are good at something they want you to stay doing that one thing. People are told that it’s possible to move laterally in the company, but this does not happen. Training – There isn’t any. BMcD basically throws you to the wolves, and god forbid if you have any questions. If you ask anyone any questions they make you feel like you’re bothering them with silly questions you can look up in the help menu. Mistakes will be made with very little training, and the project managers will be the first to throw you under the bus. People have expressed to me that there are certain PMs with awful time management skills, and leads to projects being behind schedule. Instead of the PMs admitting fault, they will find the next scapegoat. The next scapegoat are the people on that team. These employees expressed to me that they have very little respect for their PMs for throwing them under the bus.