Sasaki Associates Reviews

Former Employee – worked at Sasaki Associates full-time for more than 3 years

Pros – nice work environment in a beautiful location, diverse and peremier projects from all over the world

Cons – strange office environment, some of the terrible people tend to dominate the atmosphere , though most of the people are nice and helpful.

Advice to Senior Management – should be smart in telling what is the most important and what is not important in implementing work, and should encouraging the passion of their fellow coworkers and

No, I would not recommend this company to a friend – I'm not optimistic about the outlook for this company

Current Employee – been working at Sasaki Associates full-time for more than 3 years

Pros – Lack of hierarchy allows for best ideas to shine through.
Good potential for growth and success because of support of an entrepenurial spirit

Cons – Deadlines can sometimes be difficult and create work/life balance issues. Travel requirements increase as individuals become more senior.

Advice to Senior Management – Provide more responsibility to younger professionals and trust them to take on more.

Yes, I would recommend this company to a friend

Former Employee – worked at Sasaki Associates full-time for more than a year

Pros – The corporate structure provides some level of organization, which many design firms lack. Access to interesting project work, if you get on the right teams and in with the right Principals.

Cons – I expected a more collaborative environment coming to a multidisciplinary firm, but the departments feel surprisingly separate, and even antagonistic at times.

No, I would not recommend this company to a friend

Former Employee – worked at Sasaki Associates

Pros – Easy commute nice work environment

Cons – definite path that doesn't fit all types of employees

Yes, I would recommend this company to a friend

Current Employee – been working at Sasaki Associates

Pros – A lot of great people to work with at a social and professional level. Good benefits package. Great commitment to sustainability work. Excellent commuter benefits.

Cons – Lack of competitive salaries. Far too many partners (40+) for the size of the firm (240). A divide has formed between the older and younger partners. Morale is low due to ongoing layoffs, lack of work, and poor leadership. Layoffs were expected in 2009 and 2010 due to the economy, but a few weeks after a company meeting in 2011 where they said no more layoffs they laid off about a dozen more people. Other firms appear to be recovering in the Boston area (hiring) while things remain flat at Sasaki. People are really beginning to question management, just not directly.

Advice to Senior Management – Since the CEO is retiring the idea of leading the company by committee is certain death. The partners have always had difficulty agreeing and for some reason they think it is going to work to run the company by committee.

Former Employee – worked at Sasaki Associates

Pros – Great collaboration, talented people, nice office environment

Cons – Repetitious building types, top heavy management, "playing it safe"

Yes, I would recommend this company to a friend

Current Employee – been working at Sasaki Associates

Pros – Good benefits, reasonable salary, some interesting project work, and a respectable level of commitment to quality work products and solid design.

There are some good, talented people who work here.

The multidisciplinary environment provides opportunities for better collaboration among the different disciplines.

Cons – Very poor, uninspiring leadership and mismanagement that lacks vision and big-picture thinking -- too many knee-jerk reactions and short-term solutions to problems that are systemic within the organization. A lot of micro-managers -- there needs to be a macro-visionary in the landscape architecture group.

The SF office plays a very secondary role to Watertown, which diminishes the opportunities for the SF office to work on world-class projects, and the environment is overly corporate for an office that is not very big.

Much of the design work, while competent, lacks imagination and innovation, and input from talented junior staff is too often disregarded.

A severe lack of transparency regarding business decisions made by the leadership.

Junior staff often get pigeon-holed very quickly into doing a certain type of work and certain kinds of tasks, which does not yield a solid foundation for professional development.

Multidisciplinary office lacks interdisciplinary collaboration and is more "silo-ed" than many single-discipline offices.

Advice to Senior Management – Management should nurture the talents of the existing staff and promote a meritocracy. Good work and efforts to show initiative often go unrecognized at Sasaki, which is demoralizing. While the company has laid off a number of people because of the economic circumstances, many others have left voluntarily because of such low morale. Management also needs to promote a more collaborative, interdisciplinary environment, and managers in the landscape architecture department need to push for more responsibility and leverage in design conversations by landscape architecture staff rather than relegate the landscape architect's role to providing assistance to the architects and planners.

No, I would not recommend this company to a friend

Current Employee – been working at Sasaki Associates

Pros – Interdisciplinary firm
Pleasant people
Nice work environment
Great firm legacy
Huge potential

Cons – Lack of unification at top levels of management
Too top heavy

Advice to Senior Management – Leverage design talent through career development opportunities.
Hire more design leaders and less management leaders.

Current Employee – been working at Sasaki Associates

Pros – Exposure to a lot of different projects types and locations
Friendly work atmosphere and activities
Competitive benefits and pay
Nice co-workers

Cons – The path to career advancement is not very clear or consistent
Projects overall are pretty average for a national firm
Long hours
Increasingly dreary with frequent layoffs, lack of work, and the poor economy.

Advice to Senior Management – Too top heavy. There are way too many principals. The firm's legacy has been built on creating world class landscape design, but there is little to show. The international practice remains a very small sector of the firm, with little work outside planning. Seems like a missed opportunity.

Former Employee – worked at Sasaki Associates

Pros – Co-workers are great - for the most part, very talented, bright, fun, interesting people who want to do good work and make a difference in the world

Cons – Communication from senior management is laughable - they think they're great at it, but its meaningless white noise. The silence around the continuing layoffs is unsettling, to put it mildly.
The feeling we get from senior management is that everyone is replaceable; we should all feel lucky to have a job; its the haves versus the have nots.
Too many principals, and many don't like or respect each other, or want to work together; feels like high school, but at least in HS you have the excuse of being young and immature. So much for the 'collaborative, interdisciplinary' culture!
Bottom line and utilization rates are all that matter.
Level of stress in no way equals the 'rewards'
HR is a joke; not advocates for the staff.
People tend to show their true colors when the going gets tough, and those colors are not pretty.
Many of the good people have left or will leave; unfortunately, some useless people remain.
Too bad - used to be a respectable design firm and a decent place to work.

Advice to Senior Management – Get serious management advisor in ASAP, before its too late
Throw out (almost) everyone at the top and start over

No, I would not recommend this company to a friend