Interesting work. Big, slow company - Senior Systems Engineer I RTX Employee Review

The entire performance review and merit increase process is a mess. Section managers, they don't work with you on a day to day basis since it's a matrixed organization, collate and summarize employee achievements from various technical leads, the day to day bosses. The various section managers rank their employees and compete with employees belonging to other section managers; this forms a department rank where higher ranked employees get larger raises and faster promotions. Good section managers frame their employee synopsis within the greater business context and show employee value where applicable --they add glitz and glamor. Poor section managers merely do what they need --and barely so. The process is too dependent upon the chance of a good/bad section manager. The merit increase process, or annual raises suffers from addressing only the middle part of the bell curve; and does not allow for exceptions and performers at the tails of the distribution. Exceptionally poor performers are put on a alternative performance development plan and still get a raise, albeit less than the average 3%. Exceptional performers are granted anywhere from 5-6% raises. Promotions range from 6-10%. The process breaks down when 1) an employee is hired in at a lower grade level than the duties and responsibilities the employee is capable of, 2) exceptionally good workers that perform much faster than their counterparts, and 3) employees are hired in at an artificially inflated level. New employees must endure through several performance reviews before they are promoted; hence they pay grade is progressing slower than that of their similarly qualified peers. Additionally, engineering grades below E03, Senior Systems Engineer I, are treated as second class employees for they aren't offered leadership or managerial positions, they can not participate in the technical honors program, etc. If a particularly brilliant employee is hired in and achieves a variety of miracles their reward will be stifled by the process in order to maintain 'pay parity'. Empirical observations show parity is maintained chiefly by education, years of experience in the field, and company seniority. That is to say, a miracle worker with a BS and 3 years experience will never out pace a freshly hired PhD until much later in the employee's career. Similarly, management will promote/prefer employees who perform marginally less, but have been at the company longer as opposed to a newer better performing employee. The last concern is a concern throughout the industry; when a company attempts to poach engineers from a competing firm. Employees require an incentive to offset the momentum loss of their previous place of employment; this incentive is usually monetary. The process breaks down when a poached employee is offered a higher pay grade and salary than he/she may deserve. This creates workplace resentment, and more tangibly it devalues organic career growth. Why would I stay at Company X and get a 3% raise if I can jump to Raytheon and get a 20% raise w/ a promotion? As stated somewhat earlier (under the GOOD section), members in middle and senior leadership promptly and correctly identify trends and issues within the company. They even perform an admirable job in forming a vision and enabling change. However, the endeavor takes a nosedive somewhere during the execution phase. Since enacting change within a Directorate or a business area usually involves scores of people I am not sure where or why the process breaks down; it just does. Obviously, the outcome is that the problem is never fixed and the company hobbles on. Phrases such as: 'mission assurance', 'ramp speed', and the entity known as 'six sigma' are examples of colossal failures in an attempt to address quality, poor foresight, and efficiency. The company commonly uses the phrase 'mission assurance' in an effort to instill the culture of producing quality work. Unfortunately, many employees find the corporate jingle laughable; they believe it to be more of a product stemming from the nationalistic propaganda machine found in WWII. Similarly, the phrase 'ramp speed' was formed to set the workplace tempo for employees to get more work done than expected. I believe the need for 'ramp speed' was Raytheon's poor workforce positioning; the company was decimated by the late 90's defense cuts, and unready for the onslaught of contracts in the immediate-post 9/11 environment. A business' need to optimize processes and procedures is clear and ever present, but inline with this review's motif Raytheon fails miserably on execution. Emphasis on the Six Sigma process is best defined as 'non-value added waste'. All employees are required to complete a six sigma project within the first year of employment. The project aims to incur cost savings through the creation of a more efficient process --create an assembly line out of a current procedure. This might work well in some environments, but the software development and systems engineering isn't one of them. I believe failure stems from the fact the Six Sigma process was designed for manufacturing type environments, and through the company's lack of innovation --or laziness and ineptness-- they've managed to shoehorn a circle peg into a square hole. Raytheon is making to effort to hide its ambition to be the best lead systems integrator (LSI) in defense. Unfortunately, this creates a dichotomy between the company's technical roots (Raytheon- building great radars, Raytheon/Hughes- building great missiles and bombs, and Raytheon/E-systems- no idea what they do), and the competencies they wish to obtain. Being an LSI places emphasis on project management skills and Systems Engineering in a universally accepted sense of the word (every engineer that doesn't fit a standard mold is labeled Systems Engineer). Employees that seek and excel in those Systems Engineering roles seem to ascend the corporate ladder much faster than those who seek to hone their technical understanding.