Boeing

Flexibility with work-life balance, stability, and job security.

Huge software engineering turnover, and for good reason. Management doesn't know what it means to develop software, so most projects end up crashing and burning miserably.

Your manager will likely have some random degree and experience that has nothing to do with software. Their sole purpose for existing is to do politicking to navigate the bureaucratic mess that is Boeing.

Tech fellows provide zero leadership, as they are just as clueless about software development as management is. You will hear comments from them such as, "Is C++ a managed language?" No one can tell you why this is simply horrifying to hear from a high-level software engineer when your target language is C++.

This is a side-effect of an interview process that is 100% behavioral and 0% technical – the type of interviews at which politicians and psychopaths excel.

Every project has the stench of bad, bad code smells. Multi-million dollar a year projects with 20-30 software engineers contributing have absolutely no standardized workflow. People literally just force push to master at will.

There is no code review, no testing, copy-paste code, no CI, no lint or style guide, and huge amounts of resources spent reinventing (poorly) the wheel instead of using COTS software.

If that doesn't make you recoil in horror, read on.

Very, very limited job growth opportunities. Ask any team, and you'll find that there are level 1 engineers who have been working there for 4-5 years. If this is by design, so that it encourages job hopping within Boeing for a more varied experience in your career, great! But wait, there's a high chance that even if you find an opportunity elsewhere, you won't be offered relocation. That 10k+ to move across country for a miniscule raise will come out of your pocket.

This means there's no incentive to actually stay within the Boeing system. Your current wage is actually used as a negotiating strategy against yourself when finding a new job of interest.

Management will often tout, "But the benefits are great!" This is absolutely not the case. Health care insurance is strictly worse at Boeing than the two other companies I've worked at since.

There is a 3.6k deductible and a 7k out-of-pocket max with monthly premiums that are exactly the same as the traditional plans I got at the other companies. Pay is woefully under market value for a software engineer. If you're a mechanical or industrial engineer, I'm sure it's fine, but it simply doesn't match the lucrative market for software engineering, as Boeing lumps all engineers into one bucket.

If you're stuck in the Charleston area, then I'm not sure there are many better choices.

If you're a young software engineer reading this, fresh out of school, thinking this is your opportunity to put a Fortune 500 company on your resume, save yourself from wasting your time with what will be the inevitable. Do not come to Boeing South Carolina. The young software engineers that Boeing captures through its university outreach program leave in droves for a reason.

I suggest embedding yourself in a tech city with multiple alternative opportunities if your first choice doesn't work out.

If you think I'm exaggerating about any of this, do your own due diligence and please try the simple test of asking your interviewers brain-dead CS questions like, "What is a compiler?"

Always targeting the bottom line looks great for quarterly earnings, but will have a negative long-term impact.

There are numerous complaints from software engineers on Glassdoor how Boeing has a complete disregard for software engineering.

Tech companies target software engineers in HCOL areas because they want the best talent, and that's where they are. Boeing does the absolute opposite.

Your quest for cheap engineering labor over quality engineering labor drove two planes straight into the ground.