white-collar slavery - Managing Engineer bei Exponent: Mitarbeiterbewertung

- business development rules the day. Technical excellence is very secondary (pretty much taken for granted). With most projects spanning a period of one to two years, there's only so much technical depth that can be required anyway. - there's only one career path: associate-engineer-manager-principal. The key to growth is to find new clients. That's it. It was always a bit paradoxical to me why they shopped for new Ph.D. recruits at Stanford-MIT-Caltech, when the skill sets honed at those places really aren't needed at Exponent, and in fact the brainy-introvert type that goes there doesn't typically do particularly well at selling, or "ambulance-chasing" (get used to that ugly expression). Simple MBA's or marketing types (from anywhere), with an engineering BS/MS makes a lot more sense imho. - be prepared for soul crushing hours. Family-compromising situations, with lots of very last minute schedule changes that require you to stay there. Example:I recall receiving a call at 5pm on a quiet Friday, when nothing happened all day, and ended up having to spend an all-nighter at the office, and most of the weekend, despite having out-of-town guests at home. To be fair, Exponent tries to reward this (financially) the best they can (overtime pay at the lower levels; yearly bonuses beyond that), and I received a promotion partly based on my performance on that one project. But don't expect to get the next week off just because you worked 40 hours in three days. Saying 'no' just because you told your daughter you were going camping at the beach that weekend pretty much spells career death. To put it all in perspective, ten years later: that promotion/bonus didn't get me that far, and I still cringe at the thought that I blew off my family... - Company is arguably built as a 'pyramid scheme'. An entry-level associate will have a 'multiplier' (defined as your hourly billing rate to the client, divided by your hourly salary) of about 4-4.5. So if you make $50/hr the client gets billed $200/hr, or so. A principal will be at around 1.5-2.5. The remaining 3-hours hourly salary rate of the entry-level engineer go to 'pay for the lights' - or so they say. But someone has to subsidize the top echelon's hefty bonuses. You get the picture. - As with every company, it gets more and more financially rewarding as you go up (principal-level required), but it's exponential here in many ways (maybe where the name comes from? :) It becomes easier to attract and nurture new clients (e.g., if you're an office director, even in a small office, all new client calls go straight to you, no matter how the prospective client got the office number, so 'marketing' pretty much takes care of itself). Again, this is essential in this business. If you don't have your own portfolio of clients (soooo hard to establish, especially at the beginning when your multiplier is so high, that many never get anywhere with that.), you will feel that you serve at the pleasure of your immediate manager, who provides those clients and projects to you. There's no job security, no matter how long you've been there. If you cross him/her, watch out. I've seen heads roll from excellent technical engineers, who had been there for more than 5 years, for the stupidest of reasons. Conversely, I've seen dubiously competent ones, but with good marketing skills and a continuous stream of clients, get away with murder... And they're still there. Project this far into the future and who do you think will surround you? - lab and research facilities are only so-so. Nothing like a good university lab. Phoenix has the most extensive ones; others pretty much buy as they go, or rent others facilities. - making matters worse for the new entry-level folks managing their first few projects, some VPs have a habit of tacking a 'tax' on projects they brought in to their own practice. [The Materials and Corrosion Group VP's name is even sometime used to identify the tax!] Basically, adding a few hours here and there, with little to no value added to the project, so that their 'utilization' (fraction of hours worked, based on a 40 hour week, when they are 'billable', or billing to a project) looks good at the end of the year. [Get used to this word also, utilization, or 'UT' for short. UT is an essential metric at Exponent, at all levels. You'll be expected to maintain an average annual UT of 80%, or 32 hours a week of billable work. No, this is not possible while working only 40 hours consistently. Vacations/holidays get factored in as 0% UT, of course, and bring the average down.] So, putting aside the obvious ethical questions this brings up, it makes your projects that much more difficult to manage: you have to talk to the client at the end of the month and explain why he/she is getting billed $40k for that analysis! Enjoy.