Embedded Culture of Unethical Practices and Harassment of Personnel
Pros
Has a lot of opportunities in different sectors.
Cons
You are often verbally directed to perform activities that violate policies. Myself as well as others reported inappropriate practices to corporate on multiple occasions. This was AFTER having reported to location's management which disregarded the issues, and even went as far as to verbally reprimand employees who reported these issues in a confidential and discrete manner to management. Both levels of management disregarded these reports. Ultimately this damaged our reputation with clients and unfortunately culminated with a severe security breach that was avoidable. A couple years after I left, the location I formally worked at was visited by corporate's lawyers. Everyone was interviewed for weeks, and upon conclusion of the investigation, every single staff at that location was terminated. Such measures would be avoidable if any of the prior reports had been followed up on, as many of them could have easily been verified as potential issues by have IT staff audit the offending security practices to verify that the incident reports were accurate. I would encourage anyone working for SAIC to take precautions to protect yourself legally, and ensure you get email acknowledgement of any assignments given to you verbally, and ensure you save the emails in a manner that preserves the PGP signature. Given the sensitive nature of much of the work we perform for our nation, these could become legal or even criminal matters. Ensure these emails do not contain confidential or sensitive material, thus allowing you to maintain digital copies and backups indefinitely without fear of retribution. Corporate fails to understand one thing: those seeking to enforce security best practices do so in the interest of strengthening our relationship with clients, and maintaining our contracts. When you reprimand individuals who act in the interest of the corporation and the nation, and are doing exactly what your training materials direct them to, it undermines your long term business model. This is not the worst of what I experienced, and I still get knots in my stomach when I think of a couple incidents in particular that has negatively impacted my career and caused irreparable harm given that even years after I will actively avoid positions or responsibilities that potentially would expose me to these types of incidents.
