It's not at all different from a consulting company, functioning with a university mentality. There is a significant lack of maturity into the overall behavior, and people are still behaving like they are students (too much "all about ME" mentality commonly found at school, and rarely "all about US" mentality which is the way industry normally works).
The company is formed of technical and non-technical people. The non-technical ones are totally ignored.
The technical people are formed of two groups: the ones that write proposals and bring money, and the ones that implement these proposals to justify the money. The first ones are viewed as Masters, and they can do whatever they want, whenever they want, to whomever they want. The second ones are viewed as Servants, and they must do whatever the Masters tell them to. Contradicting or challenging the Masters is virtually forbidden (unless you are another Master), and doing so could get you in serious troubles.
As a Servant, nobody cares about your whereabouts. You are transferred from one project to another a few times per year. If your skills are matching or not the needs of that project is completely irrelevant, and it's not in your power to refuse it. So, if needed, it is your job to become overnight an SQL servers expert, even if you've been hired as a DSP/RF expert. The provided training programs are a joke, basically nonexistent, and any other training is expected from you to be done during your personal time (just like homework during school). And you can pretty much expect the next project to require also another set of skills (i.e. fortran programming), and so on. Unless you are in the very good graces of the Masters, rarely you are being assigned to work on a project matching the skills you've been hired for. Regardless, your main purposes are always to please the Masters, and bill many hours.
As a Master, your only task is to write proposals, sugarcoating ideas (no matter how unrealistic they are) in a way that would trick the customers to open their checkbooks. Once this is done, you get your BD award, you pick Servants to implement the proposed idea, and with this your job is quasi done most of the time. Next step, it's all up for the Servants to try to figure out how the heck to implement that cuckoo banana idea. Obviously, failure to do that, and the Servants are the ones to be blamed (regardless if the idea was practically unfeasible in the first place). Any success, and the Masters get all the credit, more bonuses and promotions.
They only key to success into the company, is either to be one of these Masters (which is a very "exclusive club"), either to be liked by one of these Masters (comes with a lot of butt-kissing, and in the end is the only way of joining the Masters club yourself). What you actually do, from technical perspective, is most of the time irrelevant, as long as you keep the Masters in a good light and maybe keep a high Billability. And this is the only path for a career advancement, which anyway, it can take years (if not decades) until you are allowed to advance one step.
Complete lack of development cycle. Everybody implements the way he/she wants. For example, there is no validation process before any code commits (anybody can commit code whenever he/she wants with no protection whatsoever against breaking builds and inserting bugs). Unfortunately, most of the projects never go over the proof of concept phase, and are thrown to the garbage once funding stops. Extremely few projects manage to turn out into something concrete (i.e. product).
Company preaches ethics and core values, still you can see or hear constantly cases when people step over them (sometimes grossly). But depending on which club they belong to, they can easily get away with. Talking about these, obviously, is not recommended, as the "image" of a perfect culture must be kept intact at all costs.
