Avantages
- Transit-accessible location in downtown Oakland. - Amazing nearby lunch locations. - Excellent place for a young engineer to learn how to design highly efficient HVAC systems, especially radiant slabs with dedicated outdoor air systems. There are a few senior engineers that are a great wealth of knowledge if you can manage to work on projects with them. - Casual dress and flex-hours.
Inconvénients
- Undersized office for the staff count, unreliable HVAC (bring an extra jacket in winter), two shootings in front of the office in the last three years. - High turnover rate (20-30% per year) makes it difficult to develop working relationships and keep consistent project staffing for multi-year projects. There are few employees with > 3-year tenure. - Pay and benefits below the industry average, especially for living in the Bay area. - Little support for staff training and growth, so it's hard to gain much more from the company after a year or two. That's a big reason why people leave. - Growth in recent years has made the project pipeline less selective and less innovative (boring). - IG is ill-equipped to incorporate new technology in the design process, with an internal R&D fund equivalent to the internal cost of 1-FTE-year for a ~400 person company. There are no software engineers on staff or plans to hire any, despite the stated belief among management of the importance of tech and automation. Spreadsheets. Spreadsheets everywhere. When a little bit of code could save hundreds of hours. IG is unwilling to train employees for this mandatory 21st-century skillset. Some offices (not Oakland) are still using Trane Trace for load calculations or eQuest for energy models. Yikes!