Be Warned: You're Expendable to Holder - They'll Exploit You for All You're Worth.
Pros
- Perfect for the over-achiever who loves to be arbitrarily subservient to authority, keep their head down while walking forward, and be treated as second rate to your superiors. - You can say you work at a top ENR firm. (If your ego is that fragile to care about the statistic.) - You get to spend your weekends on-site working. (For every Saturday you work, you're effectively making 20% less than what your salary is, because Holder bases your pay off a 5-day work week.) - You get to spend literally 75% of your waking life at work. Most likely a con, but depends on who you are. - Opportunity to sporadically move with little-to-no notice to different areas of the country. (They'll literally only give you a 1-2 week notice to move across the country.) - Annual retreat allows for binge drinking on the company's dime and a big dose of cultural Kool-aid. (If you're into that "Blue" Kool-aid.) - Sr. Management & Executives are young, relative to the industry. However, those spots are filled and they're not retiring any time soon. Joining this company now under the presumption that you'll have lots of room for advancement is like buying Apple stock now and believing it'll grow at the same rate it did a decade ago. You're too late, look elsewhere for the opportunity. - Large, marquee projects (if you're lucky enough to be assigned to one). Otherwise, data centers in the middle-of-nowhere areas. - 17 days PTO, 9 Company Holidays (PTO includes days off for any reason, such as sick days, bereavement leave, etc)
Cons
- Every day at work is a conspicuous demonstration of superiority to see who can show up first and leave last, arbitrary to what gets done or how much work needs to be done. - Field management walks all over office management and treats them like trash. For whatever reason, the uneducated Field management staff is regarded higher than literal Engineers (E.G. went to school to study Engineering), the "bean counters" and "pencil pushers" in the Office. (Be prepared to be berated in the previous manner on a daily basis. "It's how the industry is," is their response when questioned why you have to subject yourself to it.) - If you love running the corporate rat race, this is the place for you. Promotions are based upon how well you can submit and take constant verbal abuse, waste your time standing at your desk pretending to work so that you can be "working" for 12 hours a day, and succumb to the every whim of your megalomaniac Office and Field managers. - If you work for Holder, they will literally treat you as though they own you. - They claim it's a performance based culture, that you are in control of your own advancement and that you can prove your worth through your work product, yet still maintain that time spent at the company is a metric they evaluate. (This is what they tricked me with.) - Everyone seems to claim that Holder is the best of the best and that SO many people leave and come back, claiming that the grass wasn't greener on the other side. However, this has proven to be a manipulation tactic by management to make you second guess the constant abuse you receive daily and to be weary of searching for employment elsewhere. - They are steadily becoming top-heavy (Lots of high-up, expensive, executive positions that drain much needed resources) which is, in turn, causing lower pay to the ground floor employees doing the actual leg-work on the projects. - Inept management that dumps excessively heavy workloads onto new hires (Office Engineers, Engineers aka TREs) under the premise that you're the "Trade Responsible Engineer." What this means, is that even if you have specific resources to handle specific PM duties ( VDC, Pay Applications, Pre-Con, etc), it's always your job to do their job before you send it to the support group. In actuality, the culture has been bred to shift any actual work onto these lower employees to the point of not being able to handle the workload. This is how they exploit their employees for every cent their worth, while invalidating their desire to reciprocate that value from the company and to be compensated equally. I.E., either Holder gets double/triple the value of what they pay you, or leave. - They lie about Employee Turnover. They purposefully manipulate the stats to exclude those who leave within the first year or two, and claim that those losses were "beneficial because they weren't good fits for the culture."
