Pros
Pockets of encouraged innovation and support from management to provide people and resources. Competitive contender for several large programs of record. Recent attempts at investing in R&D for targeted growth areas and employees to catch up to peer companies. Some very bright and capable people. Some attempts at making training and information more accessible via the wiki and tracking performance/tasks with JIRA. Some training and education assistance is offered, but professional development requires individual initiative, persistence, and is dependent on manager.
Cons
Wide spread apathy and confusion over goals/best practices among many functional groups. Management was focused narrowly on cutting costs (caused many to leave for better pay) and backfilling with new hires right out of college (many later laid off to cut costs again), without training or tasking to support growth. Many of the competent, and even many incompetent, have left for better pay (+20%) or more balanced workload at other organizations in the region. Many groups suffer from boredom or are overworked due to uneven distribution of work and attention from management. Pay for new hires is not industry competitive and often barely meets or is below typical offers, with advancement pay gap widens compared to industry and "market adjustment" raises just barely bring people from well below to the bottom edge of average again. Many programs bringing in most of the money are already slated to be retired or finish productions with few upgrades or sustainment planned and their successors chosen that exclude the Textron offerings. Uncertainty lingers over whether attempts to break into new programs of record unrelated to previous cash cows will be successful or able to fully replace them . Slow advancement, some groups have a line based on seniority. Performance management is ineffective, virtually all personnel receive the same official rating and then are compared subjectively and unofficially for a slight increase in raise % or timeline for advancement, but is limited in proportion to size of group regardless of merit. Little formal guidance or process for on-boarding in most groups, stove-piped or tribal knowledge being lost is common. Most official processes are too dense and obscure to actually be implemented, disseminated, or found in a timely manner making the process groups that develop them almost irrelevant.
