Great Engineers, Broken Leadership
Pros
The individual contributors and engineering managers are genuinely talented, hardworking people who care about their work and each other. If you’re early in your career, there are real learning opportunities and good mentorship at the peer and manager level. The technical work itself is engaging, and working with the warfighters is rewarding.
Cons
Leadership is failing this company, and most engineers know it. The core problem is the business model. Leadership wins contracts by promising fast and cheap. While they spin it as a competitive advantage, the cost is being paid by the engineers delivering the work. Nights, weekends, personal sacrifices. Seemingly endless sprints aren’t the exception, they’re the norm. That’s not a growth strategy, it’s a slow bleed. You can only burn through so many people before the talent walks and the reputation follows. Engineering isn’t involved in the RFP process, which means unrealistic timelines are baked in before engineers even know the project exists. “Decentralized decision-making” is something leadership says, not something they do. In practice, decisions funnel through the top regardless of who the actual SME is. Engineering managers are not empowered to make final decisions within their own domain, and the engineers/ICs beneath them aren’t either. The people closest to the work have the least say in how it gets done. Accountability is applied selectively. When engineering drops the ball, it’s loud and public. When the problem traces back to another department, it quietly disappears. People notice. There is a visible nepotism problem. A number of long-tenured employees have accumulated seniority and promotions that are difficult to reconcile with their actual qualifications. Rather than being held accountable, they continue to advance and hire direct reports to absorb the work everyone around them knows they can’t do. Engineering sees it clearly. Leadership either doesn’t or doesn’t care. The all-hands meetings are a biweekly reminder of how disconnected senior leadership is from the daily reality of their people. Attendance is low because ICs who are grinding don’t want to sit through a polished performance that glosses over the very problems they’re living. You can tell a lot by who shows up in person. Nothing illustrated the disconnect more clearly than the first meeting back after the end of year review. Bonuses and raises had been generally low across the company. Then, the first major announcement back was that upper management had promoted themselves from Directors to VPs. Even if it was a title change only, the timing and optics were abysmal. They chose to celebrate themselves at a time when company morale was approaching all-time lows. You can’t manufacture that kind of tone-deafness.
