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Senior Software Engineer
Current Employee
Has worked at Boeing for 9 years
July 14, 2018
Germantown, Maryland
3.0
Doesn't RecommendNeutral OutlookNo CEO Opinion
Pros
  1. Great health benefits. The company is very flexible about the use of sick leave.

  2. Generous amounts of vacation per year, and vacation carries over from year to year (up to a certain point).

  3. The company is relatively flexible about telework and flexible hours.

  4. Work/life balance is pretty good. Over 95% of my weeks are under 50 hours, and I've never really had a week over 60 hours.

  5. The work, for the most part, is interesting and impactful to society.

  6. There are lots of opportunities to do different kinds of work, as long as you're proactive with your manager. (This may depend on your organization.) I started as a C++ embedded software developer, then transitioned to full-stack web development with modern JavaScript frameworks, and now I'm transitioning over to systems engineering.

Cons
  1. My organization has a very short-term outlook. Priorities set by management change on a weekly basis. This, I think, is in part because Boeing as a whole expects its subsidiaries to perform well each quarter. I work at a Boeing subsidiary.

  2. Raises suck. They're better than inflation, but not by all that much. Promotion raises are bad as well, and even after you've moved up a level, they don't increase your raises by all that much.

  3. We are required to take a lot of useless training every year. It's perhaps useful the first year you take it, but not after that.

  4. The career ladder grinds to a halt once you hit senior engineering level (level 4 and above; the highest non-executive level is 6). Climbing the ladder while remaining technical is extremely hard to do and requires a lot of ambition and a little bit of luck. Becoming a manager may be a bit easier, but by doing so, you sacrifice your ability to do technical work. Boeing expects its managers to be people persons and nothing else.

  5. Boeing is mired in bureaucracy. Trying to get things done through official channels, like getting licenses for software, takes weeks at a minimum.

Advice to Management
  1. Have a well-defined vision and communicate it in a way that everyone can understand.
  2. Be more transparent. Don't pretend things are rosy when in fact they are not.
  3. Don't sacrifice your people for your shareholders.
  4. Boeing executives need to stop sending useless emails around holiday time. Employees learn to ignore these emails, which is bad because they sometimes contain really important information.

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Boeing Interview Experiences