Boeing

• Good benefits.
• Excellent retirement benefits (6% company match + 3% for free).
• Overall, pretty good work-life balance with a flexible schedule.
• Good coworkers; most are very smart and pleasant to work with.
• Allowed to WFH full-time during Covid-19 (up until I left in mid-2020).

I worked in two different teams during my time at Boeing: the DSP Algorithms team and the Satellite Flight Software team. These were both under the Defense/Space side of Boeing, so I can only speak about my experience within that branch of the company.

BUREAUCRACY: Boeing is a huge company, so there’s a stifling amount of bureaucracy that you have to deal with here. Literally every step of your work has to be reviewed and approved by several people. Boeing loves to preach about innovation, but the truth is that the bureaucracy stifles any breath of innovation, as there’s almost always a mentality of, “We’ve always done things this way! It works, so don’t change it!”

INCOMPETENT MANAGEMENT: Almost all of the managers I worked with were frustrating to work with in some capacity, and many really didn't seem to care about their employees.

I was initially hired to work as a DSP Algorithms Engineer at Boeing. After a few months, I realized that the type of work that they do (Simulink & Matlab) was not what I wanted to spend eight to nine hours of my day on, so I asked management if I could switch to a team that works on software. They were initially understanding and supportive of my decision, but after only about three months being able to work on software, they pulled me back into doing systems engineering work for six months. The worst part was that they did not even give me this news through an in-person chat (this was pre-COVID); they simply notified me through an email. Because nothing screams "we care about our employees" like telling them they have to immediately switch back to doing the work they disliked for half a year through an email.

Another manager that I worked with for my first program basically micromanaged me and constantly asked me for my progress status almost every day at a certain point, because the program had slipped in schedule. I was a new hire at the time and was the only person actively working on verification, so I have no idea how they expected me to meet their schedule virtually alone.

The final task I had to complete for the systems engineering team before switching to the software team for the first time was a software tool to allow the hardware team to do some of their verification testing. This same manager slept on the code that I gave their team for nine months before properly testing it, and then expected me to prioritize working on his program to debug that software tool while also working full-time on the software team. They had the audacity to claim that their program had “a much more pressing schedule” than the software team's, yet somehow didn't bother to test my software tool with their hardware for nine months.

Another manager that I worked under did not seem to understand that I was frequently being pulled into doing work for both the systems and the software teams at the same time due to program schedules. They kept insisting that I put in a full 40 hours a week to keep up with my software tasks, and to only work on the “urgent” systems engineering task as overtime. This was right when COVID-19 and lockdowns were starting, and everyone was already anxious about the situation. Because I was frequently being bothered by my former team and the hardware team to help debug work that I hadn't touched for nearly a year, I was unable to complete all of the tasks I was given on the software team in time. This was held against me by this manager, who didn't allow me to officially switch into the software team due to many of my software tasks slipping schedule. Frustratingly, this same manager was the one that told my primary manager to reassign me back into doing systems work in the first place. They had me reassigned to a team outside of software, yet when I was back on software, complained that I wasn't getting the work done in time, which was also partly due to my lack of experience with the processes that the software team followed, which I could've avoided if I was never reassigned outside of the software team in the first place. This pathetic excuse of a manager was the biggest reason why I eventually left, as they obviously did not care about their employees.

LACK OF HANDS-ON WORK: Both teams that I worked on while at Boeing involved working with the hardware. However, we engineers on these teams did not get the opportunity to work on or test our designs/code on actual hardware. Instead, all of the work that we did was tested in simulations. Yes, Boeing is so compartmentalized that the people who do hands-on testing with the hardware are completely separate teams, and in my experience, I never even worked with them. If you're like me and enjoy working with/seeing the physical side of your engineering efforts, Boeing is probably not the company you want to work for.

DEPRESSING WORK ENVIRONMENT: Across the two teams I worked with while at Boeing, I worked in three different locations. All three were cube farms, with the last one before I left being the most depressing of all; it was basically a giant warehouse with about 100 cubes crammed into it. It was stuffy, contained no windows, and suffered from bad lighting. Forcing everyone to work from home because of the COVID situation was actually a bit of a blessing in this sense, as I no longer had to come into a stuffy, depressing cube farm every day.

LACK OF AMBITION: Like I said in the Pros section, many of the people (non-managers) I worked with were good and smart people, but you’d be hard-pressed to find any employees who truly enjoy their job and look forward to coming in to work every day. A large amount of the people I worked with were either complacent in their current role or were applying to leave the company as soon as they could. This is a company where your ambition dies the longer you stay here.

Listen to your engineers first and foremost. If they require the use of modern software tools to more reliably do their job, give it to them. Don’t be so incredibly stingy with the budget; invest in more modern tools and internal tools.

Be more understanding with individual employees’ situations. Virtually none of the leads or managers that I worked with were understanding of my being forced to work on several programs at once, and they all expected my full time and focus on these programs.

Overhaul the work environment so that people aren’t so depressed and unmotivated as soon as they get into the office. This isn’t the 1950’s anymore; there are other work layouts other than just cube farms.