Boeing

Reasons to work at Boeing:

1. You want your advanced education fully paid by the company.
2. You have external activities that require a lot of time and you do not need work interfering.
3. You just need a paycheck.
4. You are incompetent and cannot cut it working intelligently or effectively elsewhere.

1. Seniority-based promotions

Naturally, management and HR spin this to say they do not follow this practice, but on numerous occasions, regardless of leadership or technical contribution to my projects as senior lead, I still did not receive a promotion. Reasons included:

• Not being at my current position long enough.
• There were other engineers who had been waiting for a promotion longer.

1. No technical excellence

There is little or no technical excellence remaining at the company. Much of the engineering work is done from the books, with engineers being reduced to highly paid librarians for customers.

1. Aerospace engineering trumps all

Even though one of my degrees is in the primary domain of the company, being an engineer of that domain (aerospace) trumps everything else. As a person with other degrees in software and computational engineering, I often encountered aerospace engineers who could not pass data structures 101, yet were leads for very visible, externally facing software projects.

1. Everyone is a widget

Management regularly shuffles people around to different jobs as the company constantly tries to restructure. Instead of making employees accountable, management instead places people in areas where they have zero experience or education that qualifies them for the position. I have seen people with zero engineering background other than to act as technical editors become promoted into engineering, only to see them a few years later move to another engineering position in a startup program that requires an actual engineer. Note, people with B.As in English literature are designing your airplanes you ride on.

1. Lethargic, slow

Decisions that take 1 hour to 1 day in my current job have traditionally taken 6-12 months at the Boeing company.

1. Drowning in people

Q: How many Boeing engineers does it take to screw in a light bulb? A: All of them.

In my current position, we are empowered to make business decisions and enact solutions on a regular basis. More so, many customer-facing initiatives are started and finished in a day. I have seen similar functionality started at Boeing with 6 or more engineers and take 12-18 months.

1. There is no IT

With the exception of IDS (Boeing's Integrated Defense Systems), if you wish to do anything remotely involved with software, then this is not a good company to work for. Programmers are not trained for the work they do, or have any formal training in computer science or software engineering. If you are senior, then your team will be composed primarily of people who do not care about pointers or singly-linked lists. And if you are junior, you will never find anyone to help develop your professional skills.

The company is bankrupt from an engineering perspective. The company can afford to lay off over 50% of its people and demand more of the remaining employees. The Boeing Company is imploding as we speak due to a long-standing policy of not holding ourselves accountable to any sort of technical excellence. While there are certainly smart people at Boeing, employees become institutionalized to the lethargic, indifferent, and often-times incompetent leadership that is The Boeing Company.