Pros
Potential opportunities abound! At the engineering and design level there are people here with great skill and ability. The opportunity to touch a variety of industries and environments is all around. River makes its way to many different segments from manufacturing, petro chem, coal, nat gas, bulk material handling, etc... but that's where the excitement dissolves.
Cons
Setup up for failure at every turn! The professional project managers have all left, but when they were there they were brow beaten into accepting unrealistic schedules and overwhelmed with change management. The result of this is having people who have no business managing projects performing this very task. The twist here is that when these poorly executed projects are late or have significant faults, the blame is simply redirected to the engineers and or designers, not the project manager holding all the cards. Cases are built to demean the work staff, not develop. Accepting accepting responsibility and ownership means placing a target on your back. So if you're interested in taking pride for your work your also interested in taking blame for the project manager's failure to give you the information to do your job well. At River, if you're hired to fill a specific position, that doesn't mean that's what you're going to do. You're a warm body to fill a task, not build on you're profession or discipline. Success is measured by your ability to produce volume on schedule. It may seem that this review may come from my inability to achieve, I can recognize that. However, when the schedule is regularly developed around impractical work hours and vaguely defined scope, unless you plan on working undocumented hours (this happens way to frequently) then you are going to fail. Engineering about is about transposing knowledgeable and intelligible information into tangible evidence with some semblance of quality and understanding. We are about redlines and rework, back-pedaling and shooting the blame gun with unlimited ammunition. The real injustice here is that the responsible people have no shame, there is no accountability. River continues to make money, we continue to find clients, but in many cases, it becomes an adversarial relationship. They regret hiring us, we regret having done business with them. At the end of the day, you'll feel bad about the work you did now matter how good it was.