HII Senior Software Engineer reviews

If you are an ambitious person who is details-oriented, motivated, and productive, look elsewhere! The company gives annual raises regardless of performance. You might be a low performing employee and get a raise higher than a high performing employee on the same team. Don't be surprised because it is all about your relationship with your manager on a personal level. Zero career growth unless you have a good relationship with your manager and he/she decides that you deserve to be promoted based on your relationship with them, not your work ethics, skill level, and experience. No work-life balance as your life revolves around your job, how to satisfy your manager, and survive their exceptional micromanagement skills. You will be physically beat, mentally exhausted, and emotionally defeated by the time you get home just because of the company's toxic environment. Benefits are okay, but by far not the best. 401k company match is very low. The only good thing about the shipyard is job security and the ease of getting a job there. Once you get hired, you will never be fired even if you are not doing any work. You can basically get paid just for showing up. High performing employees at NNS perform high mostly because of their mindset, not because it is a company-wide culture. A lot of managers use techniques that no longer work. The company needs a complete overhaul for management and their practices. They need to start doing a yearly quantitative evaluation of their employees and their performance and the reward has to match performance, not personal relationships.

Most people who work at Newport News Shipbuilding are not engineers (less than 20%). And most of the engineers are not software engineers (less than 20% again). Thus, software engineers are tiny portion of the total workforce so the company culture is dominated by people who are clueless about what good software engineering looks like. Therefore, it is common for low-quality software engineering practices to persist for decades unimpeded. The engineers at this company, software engineers included, are below average. Worse, they are complacent in their mediocrity. You can try to raise the standards if you really care about quality, but it will be an uphill and lonely battle. And it will be a political battle, where you will be more successful the more gregarious you are. I never got punished but I have been taunted and ridiculed by engineers for trying to raise the standards of my work if it require them to do anything at all. The pay is below average. But this makes perfect sense with everything else I said above. Pay and performance culture go roughly hand-in-hand. Below average pay nets below average engineers. Finally, for software engineers, the Navy (NAVSEA) isn't good at software. They often don't understand what best practice software engineering looks like and don't care. This can end up being a real impediment to the career growth of software engineers as NAVSEA sometimes oversees the creation of software tools that software engineers are required to use, but the tools themselves can be quite bad and not marketable (NNL often creates them).