Pros
Waterloo had fostered a great team since my arrival in 2017, with only 5 main staff in the group remaining. These people are knowleadgable and have been a great second family to me. Very flexible and willing to help each other out when needed. 1 more senior engineer in particular is a serious MVP who I believe gets less recognition than is deserved (not me!) and is a major reason I have stayed as long as I have. Big company and has some opportunity to try some new projects outside of your immediate surroundings with rare placements in other regions, provinces or countries. Big company style benefits are nice and have come in handy for my family. Pay out mileage for field work on a per kilometer basis, and does alright to help keep personal costs down if you drive an older and more fuel-efficient vehicle.
Cons
SW Ontario is still developing for Geotech. Projects can be feast and famine seasonally, and other offices have a hard time staffing correctly with seasonal workers to accommodate the fluctuating workloads - often on the side of "we are short-handed and need your people at the drop of a hat with little to no reward other than verbal praise (after the heavy handed "you have no plans the next 2 weeks as of today because we are sending you out of town" conversations that sometimes get passed down the chain of command to those who have staffed properly to support their own seasonal influx of work. Having received my P.Eng. after being an E.I.T for a year or so (registered late) I had expected that each change would grant me more opportunities for responsibilities/duties AND pay. However, my responsibilities have grown substantially since my original Co-op Field Technician role (of which I do a frequent amount of that work as well to fill these previously mentioned gaps), yet my pay lags behind other engineering cohorts of my graduating year who just recieved their first job and do NOT have a P.Eng. license (by factors of 30+%). HR and Stantec as a whole do NOT disclose salary band or relative positional compensation data. Upon asking several staff for an idea of what other engineers are paid, you are forwarded to your own supervisor who will have to go to bat for you with those higher up the ladder. There has yet to be compensation transparency, and I believe that underpaying as many employees as you can is just the name of the game - and replacing those who don't want to play when they find greener pastures. Unfortunate to see when the team working for them is very valuable and in my eyes very good at their jobs and developing meaningful client relations. I may have been a victim of circumstance in a newer group that suffered some harder times in the first years onboard, but the lack of complexity of work and often times underwhelming and tough hours with no real end in sight for compensation changes makes for a hard to digest commitment to stay for a long period of time.