Lockheed Martin reviews

Pay is substantially below the average for software engineers. Management doesn't realize that we have other options than the stagnant defense industry. A number of great employees have left for higher pay and better benefits, leaving fewer people stretched thinner and thinner. Management's spreadsheet based approach to staffing projects doesn't recognize that you can't replace someone with 5-10 years of experience with a fresh college hire or someone new to software development. I have serious doubts about our future ability to meet our future requirements given the steady decline in the talent pool over the last few years. Management only values "leadership" traits in evaluating employees. If you don't aspire to be a non-technical manager yourself, you have no chance of being evaluated as anything better than middle of the pack. That means you will get a paltry annual raise that doesn't even keep up with inflation, let alone industry salary growth. It also means that no matter how good you are, you can't be promoted without at least pretending to want to do management-type activities. If you aren't good at what management values, no amount of logic and reason will convince them that you are a good employee. The performance appraisal system is sufficiently vague and nebulous that any manager can give any employee any assessment and find an excuse to justify it. Senior management is severely disconnected from reality. They once sent out, in one day, two emails, one of which congratulated everyone on record quarterly profits, the other of which announced a deep round of layoffs. Layoffs have been an annual occurrence for four years, drastically depressing morale.

When you start at Lockheed, you'll hear people joke that we're the company that Dilbert is based on. After a year or two, you'll find out that those people weren't joking. While Lockheed can shower responsibilities and experience on young employees, all promotions are based on years of experience and all raises are based on sucking up to management. This is the sort of company where you could single-handedly win a $25 million contract and be turned down for a promotion because you are 1 month of experience short of the requirement. By the way, that's not hypothetical. In my time at Lockheed, I've seen situations just like that play out... twice! Lockheed is a silo'd company, so it really feels like a loose alliance of hundreds of small-medium companies. It's sort of an interesting place to work, until you realize that all parts of Lockheed fiercely compete with each other. We operate like a pack of wild animals, constantly fighting each other for food, but remaining together for survival. This creates a toxic, ultra-competitive environment where people are rewarded for betraying the guy down the hall because he's from a different part of the company. I've seen people get their yearly raise reduced for helping other parts of the company win new business. The last important thing to know is that they've been making small benefit and quality-of-life cuts every few months for the last ~3 years. They're usually small, but they keep happening like clockwork and they're adding up. I've had multiple raises and a promotion and my total compensation is the same as when I started. In essence, good performance is rewarded with just enough of a raise to keep your salary from shrinking.