Pros
- Great benefits (3 wks vacation/yr that are cumulative up to 10 wks, 401k, health coverage, employee discounts, free local transit, etc.) - Good amount of travel opportunities (got to rack up those FF points in my first few years) - Tuition reimbursement (10.5k/yr for graduate engineering degree) - Good rotational programs available for leadership development - Overtime/comp time available for excess hours you work - For most positions, decent work/life balance with fairly flexible hours and opportunity for personal time off - Overall, strong aerospace company to work for with a lot of interesting projects if aerospace is your career goal; motivated and charismatic employees shouldn't have much issue working their way up or finding challenging projects to work on
Cons
- Enormous company with many, many, many layers of middle management, most of whom have too little power to influence positive change and too little technical skills to understand what's actually going on in the trenches - Preponderance of government contract work means you will have paperwork and red tape in your day-to-day, and loads of it - Compensation/promotions disproportionately reliant on people skills rather than technical performance; career growth dependent on penetrating and socializing with maximal layers of management - Risk averse on most projects, with strong tendency to stick with what works and not what's best - Tools made available to employees is usually unsatisfactory; difficult to get extra monitors/computing accessories, computing resources are sub-par with tons of extraneous bloat for security software, don't even ask about open-source/freeware tools, most employees still use IE7 and most company tools only work with IE, etc. - Restricted access to outside world (e.g. no GMail, many sites blocked/restricted which makes searching for online answers difficult at times, no music streaming, etc.); if you work in a classified area, you do not have access to your cell phone or the external web - Skills you develop are generally applicable to only the aerospace industry; processes are quite rigid and tools that you use are likely out of date, even if you are indeed working on cutting edge products - Overall, constipated work environment tends to stifle innovation and creativity, and tends to soften young engineers in an era that is all about the technological bleeding edge