Boeing

It is a shame that a company that makes so many interesting products and has so much potential for interesting research has instead severely crippled its research capabilities, scientists, and engineers due to terribly misguided management.

My coworkers and immediate supervisors have been the kindest people I know. My colleagues are bright and professional, and I have learned an enormous amount from them. They have persevered through tremendously difficult working conditions.

The company is filled with fine, hardworking people being strangled by the incompetence and greed of those at the top. The priority is to cut costs, and you will be working to eliminate other people's jobs until your turn comes, too.

If you have a PhD, you can watch your career slowly erode the longer you stay here. This company does not value research done in-house. Instead, they believe all useful research comes from universities, which they fund, or small companies, which they buy and engulf.

Your creative ideas will languish if they do not fit into the current corporate vertical silos. There is constant shuffling above you, which is inevitable as there are so many layers. The managers you know are all good people and very personable. The ones you only see on webcasts are the ones eliminating jobs even when the company is raking in record profits. They say they are doing it for the good of the company. Sorry, if you are not on board.

Young people are encouraged to join to use the ping pong tables. Higher-paid personnel are encouraged to leave by periodically shuffling jobs and reducing funding.

Before you find the exit door, either walking out or being pushed from behind, you can slowly strangle in a maze of red tape. You will spend somewhere between 20 and 40% of your time looking for funds and complying with an ever-increasing mountain of rules. You cannot charge the time to overhead, as you can only charge about 1 hour per week to that. Nor can you charge it to a project. In short, there are a plethora of unfunded mandates you must comply with.

Some examples may help. Do you want to buy a book or some utility software for a project? No problem. Just fill out a form for the book, make sure the library does not have it, get someone else to sign, then wait a few weeks. For the software, fill out a NSJ (non-standard software justification) and wait several weeks for Purchasing to buy it for you. What, you need it now? Well, you can always buy it yourself, as many employees do. Oh, you charged it to your travel card instead of finding someone with a P-card (purchase card)? No problem, just fill out this LOD (letter of deviation, you deviant) and get signatures of your manager, their manager, and their manager's manager. You'll soon learn all the key acronyms and PROs (procedures). Sorry, little time for technical work. I told you that's what universities and small companies are for. Your job is to take their work and apply it when you have time and funding.

The place is a maddening mixture of insanity that would make Franz Kafka, Joseph Heller, and George Orwell proud. 'Repositioning' and 'geographic diversity' really mean laying off higher-paid (older) workers and expecting employees to reapply for their same jobs with less money in less desirable locations such as Alabama. Welcome to the land of Dilbert.

You will constantly be experiencing friction in getting your work done by interference from upper management. If you want to write a paper or give a presentation outside the company, you need to submit your paper 6 weeks in advance. Then another 6 weeks to make the changes for camera-ready copy, which must normally be returned within 2 or 3 weeks if your paper is to be published.

Upper management is amazingly busy. Busy reorganizing the company, deciding where to place you, inventing new names for new sub-organizations, cost-cutting, embracing the latest management fads, absorbing small companies, devising new metrics to 'flow down' to 'scorecards' on which your 'PE' (performance evaluation) will ultimately depend. The cost-cutting involves such matters as eliminating unused phone lines, replacing employee functions with new websites (each so badly designed that you need a 'ten-minute trainer' when you just want to get something done and don't have time for the nonsense). And always, always adding new rules and regulations rather than eliminating red tape or upper management interference.

Another metaphor may help. Your relationship with upper management takes on characteristics of an abusive relationship. They tell you what to do. They do not listen to you, while pretending they do. They will try to convince you that everything is going well, they are interested in research, they value technical staff, and that we all share in the profits of the company. But the truth is that things are going well for them; things get worse every year for the technical staff; upper management only wants applications of outsiders' research; and upper management can have raises of 15% or so, while yours will be below the cost of living even if you are rated 'effective.' A stacked ranking system is used, so most employees fall in the middle of the bell curve and receive ratings of 'effective.' Upper management will gaslight you, saying their actions (e.g., 'repositioning' and 'geographic diversity') encourage diversity, while their intentions are just the opposite (bust unions and save money by getting rid of more expensive, older workers). In the beginning, you will hope your perceptions are wrong, and they will encourage you in that belief. Over time, your self-confidence and self-perception will erode as management will deprive you of the resources you need to maintain your career (e.g., conference attendance, which is considered a 'perk' by upper management.) If you spend too much money on a project, you will be questioned. If you spend too little on a project, you will be questioned.

So how can you do long-term research? Well, the idea appears to be that you win CRAD contracts and the government pays for your research. Unfortunately, government agencies, oddly enough, seem to want to fund organizations with new, exciting ideas and existing software already developed to at least a proof-of-concept stage. Most of the current ATFs (associate technical fellows) were around in the pre-merger days, when lower-level managers had funds and the funds were easily available to investigate new ideas.

There is so much more that I only have time to touch on: ethics classes; the voicemail hell of TotalAccess; that management is secretly instructed not to tell you key info; upper management's financial micromanagement; the bean counters and MBAs in Chicago that will run your life, but you will never see. I could go on, but I think you get the idea.

In short, why would you want to come here? There used to be advantages to working for a large company: primarily job security, pension, and good benefits for which you were willing to put up with a lot of bureaucracy. None of those reasons apply any more. So why would you want to work here if you could work for a small company? You are just as likely to be laid off, you won't get a pension, and you won't be allowed to stay current with your skills.

It is a shame that a company that makes so many interesting products and has so much potential for interesting research has instead severely crippled its research capabilities, scientists, and engineers due to terribly misguided management.