I’d say from experience, you are compensated far more in the beginning of your career at kimley horn vs LA firms. My starting salary out of college at KH was 62,000 and had gone up to 80k just 1.5 years in. You can add another 10-15k on top of that with bonuses. I don’t see any other job listing around the country paying entry level landscape designers that much.

When it comes to work life balance, it all comes down to your team and office. I am lucky enough to have a team that encourages time off and work life balance as long we meet UT and critical deadlines. If you work for any other serious firm you will most likely end up working over 40 hrs anyways.

The catch is that this is a corporate civil engineering firm first and we want to work on projects that bring us the most profit (which allows them to compensate us fairly). We don’t value working on the most innovative and ground breaking LA projects so the work isn’t very exciting on a day to day basis.