I retired from B&V in 2015 after working there for 17 years. It was the most rewarding place I worked over a 45-year career. Plenty of promotions (I never asked for a single one), travel opportunities galore, outstanding salary, and I made a bundle in the company stock plan over the years. Which was good news, because I was able to retire a few years earlier than I had planned when I saw the handwriting on the wall.
In the Power Division, we were usually the Construction Managers on the jobs we won. That means we subcontracted with outside, established construction companies to actually do the work on site. We did the engineering and procurement from Overland Park and then, on the job site, we provided day-to-day project management, safety and quality control, scheduling, planning, and purchasing. It was a good formula that had been successful for decades. Then, around the 2012-14 period, management decided we could cut out the middle man (outside contractors) and suddenly become a full blown construction company who could self-perform all the work. Not.
To staff all of this new construction work, large numbers of people with construction backgrounds were hired in from outside companies in anticipation of all of the work they would eventually be performing. The problem was, we hadn't even been awarded any of that anticipated work (and in many cases, never won the awards), so the overhead must have been tremendous. To bury the costs, people were assigned to other, fixed-cost projects, even when they weren't needed there, which of course squeezed the budgets of those jobs.
The B&V I started working for back in the 90's had a small-feel, family atmosphere, even though we were worldwide even then. But when outsiders started being imported by the bus load, the culture started to change. The construction industry can be cutthroat, and instead of bringing in the best and the brightest, we were bringing in tons of in-your-face people from some of the worst offenders. I can only imagine the changes that apparently occurred in the five years I've been gone.
Especially for younger workers, please know that whatever company you choose, it won't be perfect. I have been a part of the evaluation/promotion process in many different large companies I worked for over my career, and they were all a joke. I have run into both managers and peers who always were, and always will be, jerks. You will always find people who have "done it this way for 40 years" and who will never change nor acknowledge your new ideas no matter how good they may be. And you will always run into managers who have absolutely no business being managers.
That being said, there are great companies out there where the good definitely outweighs the bad. The Black & Veatch I once worked for was one of those companies. It saddens me to read some of the comments here and realize that that company may no longer exist.