Thread regarding Jacobs Engineering Group Inc. layoffs

That's one of the many reasons I left Jacobs after 18 years and took a pay cut to do it. People that actually care about their work just get more dumped on them. Jacobs is run by accountants not engineers or architects. Sverdrup (and I'm sure other AE companies Jacobs gobbled up) was run by engineers and architects who would coordinate the project managers delivery schedules and regulate how much was coming down the pipeline in order to maintain high quality deliverables. Jacobs is only interested on what looks good on the accounting books and will wring every extra overtime hour possible out of you to avoid the overhead of hiring an additional employee. Jacobs quality metric is "did the client complain or reject the package". Just passable is good enough for the accounting ledger. On top of that, as Anonymous above pointed out, you are disposable. You can do good work and be a member of a already understaffed work group, and be arbitrarily laid off in order to balance the accounting books after a financially poor decision from upper management. Saw it happen in my former office. Unfortunately, I am not sure the competitors are any different in the post economic meltdown AEC world.

Yes; that’s a major issue. Another is the lack of financial benefit for employees while senior execs take multi-million-dollar bonuses. Employees are disposable to the leadership. They need major leadership and ethics training.