Arup reviews

This company actually destroyed me and caused me to come close to a breakdown due to the schitzonphrenic culture, passive aggressive managers and complete lack of structure and professionalism. At this company you will get: The level of arrogant egos at this firm is unbelievable. I truly believe most managers at this company have severe personality disorders, with behaviour not only going unchecked by actively encouraged. The Culture at this firm is the beyond all reasonable comprehension. The 'firm' as it is called (WTF?) is actually a cult which tries to indoctrinate staff into its bizzare culture. Don't be fooled though. This is just part of trying to mentally break you in a vague attempt to coerce staff into being subordinate at every level below Associate Principal. Resistance is key here. If they manage to break you, kiss goodbye to your career as you will just become a resource to be abused by incompetent managers. Arup is a firm in crisis and has no idea what it is meant to be. It calls itself an engineering firm, because it employs engineers. However, 90% of the work you do is pure admin. There is more beauracracy than a Communist State. In fact, the firms operates like a communist state. Any dissent is quickly squashed through redundancies, which happen frequently at this company. In fact the toxic culture here actually means that staff are well aware of how things operate. Most people are so scared of sticking their head out of the trench, its almost like everyone there has some form of PTSD. For a firm which on the outside promotes free thinking and doing thing differently, this level of subversion is repressive. It certainly isn't a humane organisation, as the marketing jargon likes the outside world to believe. Once you have outlived your useful like at this company YOU WILL BE MADE REDUNDANT. Because the firm is Schizophrenic, it has no long-term direction. On the one hand they make people redundant to save costs and at the same time, they try to buy market share buy hiring massively overpaid 'strategic hires' by poaching from other companies. Not really very ethical. They actually think this will give them market share. An example that 4 Senior Geotechnical Staff were made redunant yet the firm poached staff from Aecom at 4x the market rate. However, what these people don't realise is the culture is so bad at this company, most external senior hires last less than 12 months. Once this has backfired, the firm changes direction again and tries another market segment. There is no strategy at this firm. Senior manager are so incompetent they can't implement anything. The only solution to this is for these useless, mentally ill managers to embrace a culture of bullying to try and get things done. There is no recognition of neurodiversity at this firm, mainly due to reasons above. They only want neurodiverse people if the they 'fit the culture'. Actually, because most neurodiverse people are more resistant to indoctrination than neurotypical people this exhaserbates the cultural behaviuours above. They are simply seen as non-conformists and quickly shown the door. Due to the Egos in the firm, it is ultra competitive. If you are in a small department relative to the firm, then the culture is so poisionous because everyone is fightling for small bits and pieces of work. Its essentially an old boys club, run by crusty, stale white men (I say this as a middle age white man), with a few women and people of different ethnicities thrown in for marketing purposes. There is no team work at this place. Out of a team of 15 engineers, not one of them were working on the same job together. Everyone was just trying to survive and look after themselves. This creates a hostile environment, with no room for growth. I thinbk most people at this firm hope they can get experience and then leave.