Stagnant culture with broken administrative information systems
Pros
Good benefits. Low amount of hours, most younger engineers work barely over 40 hours. Some work 40.0 hours every week
Cons
Everything is very dependent and which department you are in and your supervisor, but from my experience the culture was very stagnant, hard work, effort, and just caring about the quality of your own work wasn’t rewarded or supported. It seems like however hard you try no one really will notice it unless you discover some ingenious technical solution to something no one else can solve (but obviously a once in a blue moon situation). The engineering attitude is to solve problems by looking for precedent so that you don’t actually have to prove your engineering work and can say “well we did it like this before so it will be okay”. This may just be the defense industry nature but it’s very true about everything my department did. The data and information systems which are used to look at manuals and drawings are extremely broken and it’s super common for you to find completely incorrect information and you only know this when an older employee speaks up and tells you that the information or data you’re looking at is wrong because of some reason that’s hard to explain and would only understand with experience. A large portion of every day is dealing with these broken information systems and trying to find the correct information to solve the larger task at hand.
