Pros
- Stable job -If you are a sycophant you will do well here - Work/life balance is pretty decent for most engineers. Just don't volunteer to be a waterfront supervisor because your life will be gone.
Cons
-Most of the knowledge here is not portable meaning that outside of here it really has no value. -Management would rather invest their efforts into 'outing' dissenters and then through various means of intimidation either pigeon-hole them or run them out of the company. The management is very patient in their methods and they will do it over how ever many years it takes. I have seen it, no exaggeration. This is one thing they ARE actually good at. - Communication and efficiency are NOT priorities here, the company AND the unions make more money off of the inefficiency...only in this industry does that happen - Incestuous political relationships with state government, Navy, and local unions has bred massive corruption and poor product quality, and it is only getting worse according to the 'old timers' that have been here 40+ years. Changing any of the dysfunctionality here will take an act of you know what, no exaggeration. Many facets of construction take 3 attempts or more to get correct and the company/unions/Navy oversight have no compunction about any of it. The same ol words are spoken and the same ol problems happen on the next hull, and the next, and the next...etcetera. - To say that the erosion of benefits at the company is steady would not do justice to what has happened. For example, the company gambled the majority of the pension program money, as if it were their own slush fund, in the stock market and lost it as early as 2007 (it didn't even take the events of 2008 to tank the retirement fund money, shows how intelligent they aren't even in that area). Now nobody gets a pension anymore, and the list goes on and on and on. To say they are irresponsible would not speak to the criminality of that issue. It was money that the Navy paid to the company specifically to offer to their employees as a pension and the company management gambled it illegally (and got away scott-free too).