NASA

It's always exciting to work on stuff that is planned to go to space. Furthering the goals of space exploration, human space flight and scientific discovery never gets old.

For a place that constantly talks about and promotes work/life balance, it seems to say "what life" and treat you like a cog in the machine, especially if you are on a high visibility program like Artemis.

If you work on a smaller program, don't get too attached to it either, because chances are it will get axed right when you're in the middle of it and then you're left with nothing to do for who knows how long until they can find more funding, and if they can't, they might just stick you in some undesirable job that you weren't hired to work in the first place, or look for reasons to cut you loose entirely.

NASA can't hold or manage its funding to save its life. Even the big program like Artemis, where all the money goes, probably won't carry out its full program life cycle.

There's very little coordination between programs. There are constant ego flexing matches between government, contractors, and OEMs to see who can make who look worse. When it comes to management sticking up for their employees in any situation, forget about it. They will say or do whatever it takes to cover their own behinds.

NASA, at least at Kennedy Space Center, is run by incompetent line-level and division-level managers. Some senior leadership at the center level seems to be able to manage and run the place well enough, but the direct supervisors and division-level management leave a lot to be desired.

They either micromanage you to death or don't give you the tools you need to succeed. Management at NASA seems to like to try nothing and then declare they are all out of options. Having worked at three different companies and organizations across a 16-year time period, I know the difference between a well-run workplace and one that doesn't have a clue. NASA is full of incompetence, and it plays a big part in why they are constantly behind schedule and over budget.

They either have managers who are far too old and out of touch to know how to manage a workforce, or managers who are far too new with the wrong background (a chemist running an electrical avionics branch, for example) to know how to efficiently run a branch and get the most out of their employees.