Boeing

Being a large company with several major divisions, there are a lot of opportunities to grow, learn new skills, and move to different cities or work overseas. Like any aerospace company, there will be layoffs when contracts end or sales of a particular product line decrease, but the size and diversity of the company allows some to find work on other programs.

This happened to me once, and I had to relocate to a different state to stay with the company. It turned out well, as I moved into a new job classification that provided more upward mobility, and the program I moved to had more long-term stability. The company (in the form of my old manager) helped me find the new job, and there are a number of resources available to help people find a new job in the event of a layoff.

The pay and benefits seem very competitive, and I have no complaints about either.

The cons are probably similar to any large corporation working on multiyear government or civil contracts.

There are many layers of management, too many system engineers and IPT leads.

On government contracts like the one I work on, the bean counting and required paperwork account for far too much time and effort, even for the lowest engineers.

The worst part of the job is the inflexibility of the schedule. We hear about quality all the time, but when it comes to crunch time, the only thing that seems to matter is schedule. Make no mistake, schedule is king.

This is not entirely Boeing's fault, as the customer (the military in my case) wants the product now and will sometimes accept them with more deficiencies rather than wait until all the bugs are fixed.

The other gripe I have is the enterprise tools we are required to use for most of our “paperwork”. Allegedly to save money, everyone at Boeing has to use the same systems for things like discrepancy tracking, test procedure and software configuration management, and peer reviews.

These tools, in many cases, are being used in ways they were not designed for, and none of them are user-friendly or intuitive. We get very little, if any, training on using them, so it is all based on tribal knowledge.

Take care of the people first. Then you will not have as many worries about the quality, money, or schedule.