Pros
Decent stock matching plan, good benefits with low out-of-pocket expense. Stock has performed well over the last few decades. On-site (albeit small) gym if you work in the main building at the main campus. The 9-80 work schedule gets you every other Friday off. Probably the only Detroit company still hiring.
Cons
While most of the jobs at GDLS have the word "engineer" in the title, 95% of the so-called "engineering" jobs consist of project management, supplier management, and writing the occasional specification or test plan. Don't expect to be challenged, learn anything new, or develop your skills. On the other hand, there are plenty of individuals who are more than happy to make a career out of attending meetings, so you could think of GDLS as the anti-Google: the motivated need not apply. Despite this (or because of it), GDLS has swelled in size over the last decade or so. Seating is a problem at the company, so they have taken to doubling-up in (already small) cubes, putting new "cubes" in old conference rooms, and throwing up new office areas in areas that used to be used for storage. This overcapacity problem also rears its ugly head in other areas: you'll frequently have to line up (like at a baseball stadium) to use the men's room. If there are more than two people in the gym's tiny locker room at once, it becomes unusable. Admittedly, GDLS has purchased a new building in Shelby to help mitigate the problem, but keeps hiring new individuals to replace those moved off the main campus. You'll also be expected to maintain a godlike standard of time card accuracy, undergo frequent audits, and endure numerous speeches on the importance (and ethics of) of good time card reporting. At the same time, you'll be silently pressured to put all of your hours to government-billable numbers. Expect severe push-back from management if you try to use company overheard for any part of your day. Strangely, even though the company charges the government the same rate regardless of whether your engineering hours are worked in the "normal" work week or on overtime, GDLS puts a payment cap of $25/hour in place on overtime hours. Even stranger is that this overtime cap has not been adjusted since being put in place in the early 90s, despite almost two decades of salary inflation. Finally, GDLS' IT policies are draconian. Web filtering is taken to such an extreme that sites you need to do your job will frequently be blocked. Likewise, you're not allowed to keep email older than a few weeks, and (up until recently) your old email would be silently deleted. New employees often have to wait weeks to get machines. When you do get them, you have no control over the machine, and are limited to running what's installed on them, which is typically Microsoft Office and an out-of-date version of Lotus Notes (which is a pretty awful program to begin with.) Even then, be prepared for extremely sluggish performance due to slow hard drives, virus scanners, drive cryptography software, and and overload of corporate IT utilities.
