Lockheed Martin reviews

Management has no practical engineering experience There is little to no care about the product being sold. Only way to make money is to move up into management. Directly contradicting one of the company’s hero’s own rules of engineering. The product is the number 3 priority in the company’s book. Number one is selling a story to the customer. Number two is making money by nepotism. Horizontal integration has all but destroyed the innovativeness of this company. Real engineers either leave the industry, go work for an up and coming competitor, or become a supplier. Hiring processes are a joke. Even if a good candidate decides to wade the murky waters to get a job at this company, their offer will be so laughably low they’ll turn it down. How can you seriously offer a software engineer who’s living in California $100k a year (or less) with a straight face? Human Resources are non-existent. That part of the company was so bad they had to hire engineers to do their job for them, called “Engineering and Technology.” That means instead of one manager or project leader, you have at minimum two, program and E&T. What exactly does E&T do? Even they can’t answer that question. And yes, that means there are more chiefs than worker-bees. Good teams get asked to do many different tasks and then get overloaded. Rather than hire more high quality engineers by paying competitive compensation, multiple VPs will peg one good team of engineers to do their projects. Ultimately there is too much business that can’t be supported by the small amount of high quality engineers the company possesses. LM (aero specifically) would do good to lose some business so the dead apples can be shaken from the tree.

Growth for ambitious people can be slow unless you have an executive sponsor or are politically connected. For most roles, especially at the Staff / Senior level and above, the primary consideration is whether or not you have "experience" doing work in that role. An engineer with two masters degree can get beat out by somebody with a degree in Communications or Business Administration with less overall work experience, because the latter has "specific" experience related to that role. This is an issue I have seen across the Aerospace and Defense industry. Many roles are overly specialized and this creates an issue whereby it is difficult for someone to take on roles in different areas. The company sponsors masters degrees and MBAs but they mostly serve just as a way to retain lower-level employees. They mainly assist in possibly getting you an interview. Once you get the interview, you are considered "equal" to somebody with a "Bachelors" degree. It gives you a limited advantage in overall consideration for the role. One wonders why Lockheed even bothers sponsoring the benefit? HR will always be cheap. Especially when it comes to internal employees. Count on them to give less than 80% of market value if they can get away with it.