Buyer beware - Engineer Quest Global Employee Review

Where to start? First in order to understand QuEST as a company, you need to understand that QuEST is like an umbrella of supposedly interconnected groups/centers/companies, but in reality each one operates mostly on their own. I worked for the Cincinnati, OH office where we did CFD and only CFD. My interaction with the rest of the company, globally, was non-existant. Yet, the higher ups to tout metrics and such apply the metrics over the entire company worldwide. They claim things like "30% growth" but this means absolutely nothing to me because in my center, in the people I interact with, we see literally none of this. Plus, these dubious claims of growth are mostly purchases of other existing companies so of course there will be growth in some way when all is said and done. Treat every metric you hear as if it were worth a grain of salt, unless that metric is specifically for your center. The above also has an affect on intra-company comparisons as well. For example, the engineers here in Cincinnati constantly complain about low pay, an awfully laughable 25% up to 1% 401(k) match, etc. Yet, the HR then look at our salaries and benefits and compares them to the rest of, say the US organization, which includes many things other than engineers. They say "oh gosh, these people are just complainers because they make x% above company average!" Another complaint about compensation I have is that the management like to say something along the lines of "your salaries are competitive against other contractors like us; it's not fair to compare your salary to the guy who just got hired over into GE and received a 10k+ raise because they aren't in our business." And you know what, I totally understand this. I understand where the management is coming from and maybe they are right that our compensation is competitive among our actual competitors, but this isn't what the people who are doing the work care about. What we care about is "my friend that I graduated with, with the same years of experience as me, is literally earning $20k+ than me" which leads into --> "hey friend, can you push my resume through the hoops to get me hired there?" Compensation aside, the way the actual center is run is very disappointing. The Cincinnati center is broken down into about 3 major groups within the office, each group representing one major customer. The turnover rate of engineers is extremely high because I'd bet my life that every single person working there is only doing it for the experience and/or convenience and will jump ship as soon as a better, or even different, opportunity presented itself. But the worst part about the turnover rate is that adequate replacements are not found. I can give you the example of one of these teams, and in the last two years they have lost over 5 people, most of which left to pursue better opportunities. Yet, they have hired only one person to fill in the gaps. The problem now is that this particular team is very lean now, each person in it (other than the new guy, who is new) knows what they are doing in their specific project expertise. But what if one or two of them were to leave, who takes over them? At the moment, nobody, and this is a big problem. The organization within the company is basically broken down like so: Corporate -> Center Manager -> Your Supervisor(s)/Project Engineers -> Engineers (You) You and your fellow engineers are hand in hand under the same working conditions. They get you, you get them. It's a mutual feeling that you are going through the same terrible job together and in a sense, there is support. It's never a surprise when another engineer sends an email announcing their departure. In fact, it's a congratulations (please let's keep in touch I might want a job there too). None of the engineers actually like working here or like the company. None of them are proud of working for the company. Yet, despite this shared misery, there is really no "culture" to speak of. The engineers here get along with each other, they are friendly to each other, and all of them will help you if you ask. But there is very little non-work related interaction. They are trying to change this, but once every quarter events are not doing it. The relationship between engineer to supervisor is a little bit on equal footing. The supervisors all started off as engineers as well, and many of them are still engineers. They just have extra responsibility. There are some good supervisors here, but there are also very bad ones. There are ones that act very professionally, and on the other hand there are ones that are extremely immature and constantly shout. Managers/supervisors are judged by their metrics, and this is also in turn passed down to you. The relationship between you and the center manager is not really existent. There's a new one, and he's trying to do his best with what he has available to him, but he has very little available to him so in the end it doesn't matter. He gives us a voice to the corporate people, but it falls on deaf ears either way. The worst part of this company is probably the HR department if you can even call them that. They are literally the worse. They are worse than Comcast.