Boeing

Excellent, smart, talented, and hard-working people. The work is interesting and rewarding. Boeing does some pretty cool stuff.

There is a lot of engineering/management tension (engineering union strike). As the 737 crashes congressional report showed, "there is a management culture of concealment of problems." If you ask old-timers, and even mid-career folks, they will tell you how "things went downhill ever since McDonnell Douglas purchased itself out of financial trouble using Boeing's money." The focus shifted from technical excellence to profitability. Boeing moved its headquarters from Everett to Chicago. What else does one need to know?

While there are annual reviews of management performance, I very seldom if ever felt heard. There are highly competent and caring managers, and there are incompetent jerks, as I assume there are everywhere else. Young kids supposedly do not stick around for long; at least, that's what HR would report from time to time. The 737 crashes were highly demoralizing, with management talking heads either saying Boeing did everything fine or avoiding the subject altogether. COVID-19 came on top of other bad news, with stressed folks being the largest group being laid off, and I was one of them. For full disclosure, judge my objectivity yourself.