Pros
Nice people. A lot of other companies/people still look at Lockheed Martin on a resume and are impressed. There are *some* cool projects in the company. They do provide relocation if needed for fresh college grads. 9x80 schedule is appealing to some people.
Cons
I can only speak for Software Engineering - other areas of the company may be great, but that's not my thing. 1. Outdated Technology. You want to stay current in the software industry? Don't look here. There's a reason why a lot of the higher up Software Engineers you meet have been at the company for 10+ years. They're no longer marketable to the modern industry. That might sound harsh, but it's true. Bringing on new/modern technology onto any program can be near impossible with security requirements, leaving you working with dated and deprecated technology and libraries. Some programs are starting to utilize AWS, which is nice. But the security requirements the company puts on usage are again, pretty extreme. 2. Lackluster benefits/wages. Health care costs doubled over the past year. No new coverage, no new benefits. Literally the same health coverage for double the cost. 401k Company contributions are 50% of your contributions up to 4% of your total. That's ok, but also not as competitive as other modern Software Dev companies. Vacation is ok, although nothing to be excited about. Salaries are probably slightly below National (USA) averages. Which brings us to performance reviews. 3. Performance Reviews. Lockheed uses some absolutely ridiculous system they call LM Commit, where you're expected to basically write down a handful of ways you will bring about solid, measurable benefit to the company. Ok, a lot of companies do something like this, whatever. Problem being, your commitments are rarely your own. They're almost always handed down from management and you copy/paste them in. So on paper you're committing to be a generic worker for the next year. Performance Reviews are based on these LM Commits. Issue here, they use a bell-curve system - and it's common knowledge that managers will give employees with a longer service time higher scores than younger/fresher employees. So it's really not an issue of how well you're performing, it's how many people in your program have been there longer than you. If you're doing average overall, you can expect about 1.3% increase yearly from just reviews. This doesn't always match inflation btw, so realistically even a small raise might be less money in the long run. 4. 80's-esque workplace environment. Are you a young software engineer brimming with excitement? You've seen pictures of those cool google-like workplaces with open floorplans, collaborative areas, free snacks/drinks, and generally things that make you not dread coming to work? That's not Lockheed. Again, I've only seen 2 facilities, but LM is a cube-farm culture. If you have issues with allergies, I would seriously warn you - I have issues with dust and the amount of musty old carpet/furniture/uncleaned airducts in my building was dreadful for my allergies. This is another unfortunate side effect of working in Secured environments. Not just anyone can come and clean the areas, meaning they don't get cleaned often. 5. Agile. They say they are. They aren't. You might use agile tools (more likely SAFE tools - ugh) like Atlassian/Jira (more likely version one - ugh). But you are in no means Agile. Defense contracting comes with hard deadlines and expectations. That's not Agile in the slightest. So expect to work long hours or put together shoddy code before being able to renegotiate or discuss requirements. Higher up management will openly admit that they aren't Agile, and instead use some terrible waterfall mutant. You can expect daily scrums, but the usefulness of these is questionable since some teams are waaaay too large. I was on one scrum team of 13 people. That's incredibly too large to do scrum properly. 6. Company culture. This is really more of a personal thing, but you should fully expect to have company values and culture shoved down your throat all the time. The amount of "Inclusion" and "Being a Partner/Advocate" articles on the front page is astounding. You'd think the company actually had an issue with these things, but they really don't - show up and do your job well, no one cares. You're doing well. Your ethnicity/persuasion/preferences shouldn't matter at all in this industry, just if you can do your job. It honestly feels like the company is attempting to put it's own agenda onto all of it's employees, regardless of how you might personally feel about a subject. I don't care for that. TLDR: If you're a software engineer, I would only look at Lockheed seriously if you have some fascination with defense work. If you have even the slightest bit of doubt, I wouldn't recommend it. There are too many good software focused businesses out there to make sacrifices here.
