Will say anything to get you in the door before exposing you to a toxic workplace - Project Manager Vanderweil Engineers Employee Review

- From the outset, the interviews/interviewers and middle management were underwhelming at best and willfully dishonest at the worst. In terms of timing, the period between final interview and job offer was several months, not days (or at the most, weeks) as with other professional consultants. In terms of subject matter, at my level of experience I was told that I would have direct input into management style and tools, before joining a group that was unwilling and unable to accept input and suggestions from newer employees, even if it meant improving on antiquated tool sets. - Compensation was below-average compared to offers I received doing the same work. - Related to collaboration, I learned very quickly that prior experience and related suggestions on how to manage certain client types/market sectors were not welcome. I came to find that the management of my group had a set way of doing things they did not want to deviate from, even if the level of experience you brought to the table technically exceeds theirs, in more demanding marketplaces. Tying back to the interview process, this was not the promise that was made, and it became apparent that as an employer they just needed a body at a desk and were not interested in improving their service offering. - Related to management, the company hierarchy (which is very conventional for this line of work - older, white, and male) is somewhat rigid and does not lend itself to mobility. Within the smaller, more specialized group where I was working, two people technically had equal control over the group, and were commonly not aligned in their directives - making paths forward very difficult to navigate. - The training was nearly non-existent. You will be expected to work with proprietary, cumbersome tools and templates (Excel, Word, etc.) with barely any time to understand their functionality, even if the evolving marketplace has rendered them obsolete. The management of my group routinely rolled out "new" or "updated" tools that were either outdated or outright incorrect according to latest industry standards and addenda. When suggestions were made to improve said tools, employees were either openly reprimanded or subjected to some of middle management's more covert, toxic propensities. - Perhaps it was just hubris, but I found middle management's interpretation of the local marketplace to be severely misguided. Having worked in some of the toughest markets for my line of work in the country - Chicago, Washington, DC, NY, etc., the greater Boston area is refreshingly paced, and middle management's insistence that it is in line with more competitive marketplaces is a misrepresentation that I think negatively impacts work culture and creates unnecessary stress and false intra-workplace competition. - General workplace culture and employee support is non-existent. Vanderweil tries to have things like happy hours every once in a while to build morale but day-to-day there is very little sense of camaraderie or stability, especially from the top-down. Management almost seems to go out of their way to remind you "who's in charge", and where power lies. Suffice it to say, it's easy to pick up some underlying insecurities middle management has, perhaps as a way of overcompensating for non-professional misgivings. This led to behavior from middle management that could best be described as juvenile.