“Ten Signs Your Company Couldn’t Care Less About You – Business Insider” Lockheed easily hits all of those points
Pros
You will most likely start your career at Lockheed as a CPE (certified principal engineer) delegate (discount) where you will be doing administrative engineering (level 4 role) while receiving a level 1 or 2 salary grade (had a MSEE colleague who started at L2 but still severely underpaid). My experience and perspectives I can share about Lockheed comes from a large sample size of many individuals who have had over 30 years of experience to where you could easily say they know too much about the company and what goes on behind closed doors. So yes, this is going to be a pretty detailed review. Your experience at Lockheed will vary greatly depending on your manager, team, and program. Unfortunately, the program I worked in had nothing good you could say about it except that some of your colleagues may also share the same concerns as you. One of the funniest things someone said to me to get me to stay was that “you do get paid on time” as if being paid on time was a perk no other Fortune 500 company could offer. If you want my TL; DR advice: know what you want… Get out ASAP if you are looking for a place where you have an opportunity to change the world, develop technical expertise, and most importantly get paid what you are worth.
Cons
TL; DR – If you google “Ten Signs Your Company Couldn’t Care Less About You – Business Insider” Lockheed easily hits all of those points without any effort. Backstory: I was on one of the programs which ended up moving from CA to CO. A good decision for current board of directors to save costs, up returns for shareholders, and increase their annual bonuses but bad for you, the employee esp. if you just graduated college and want to be where things are happening in Silicon Valley with all the other young professionals (more opportunities). Since they announced the move back in 2017, every week, we literally had 1-5 employees either retire or grabbed by a Tech company in Silicon which paid 2x-3x more. We also had a bunch of managers stolen by Tech (my manager included) as well which clearly shows the power of money and the ability to buy out talent which pretty much left Space Systems with average performers in general. Upper leadership straight up lied to the employees saying they will potentially get to have a new building in Sunnyvale as they placed a model of a brand new building in one of the lobbies. Fact check: that was from a Google acquisition and that building will be for Google employees. There is a LOT of politics as you would expect and it’s a big reason why people leave… I knew a previous manager who was fired for not following company polices so to combat that the directors had to hire someone from the club who they could trust to 100% follow orders and company policies (you have to sell your soul to the company to become a manager+). If he were to break any policies, he would have probably been disciplined or kicked out of the club and would not be able to ascend to the director level. But this completely sets the program up for failure moving forward because now you have new leadership based on buddy-buddy politics. In addition, new management is forced to follow a rigid set of rules which, according to many successful managers and CEOs I know, is a bad way to manage people because it assumes a one-size-fits-all or one-rule-fits-all for every situation. But contradicting that, managers still have favorites where exceptions are made. Take this for instance, there were a lot of times a colleague of mine was constantly bullied by a senior but less experienced engineer (they bumped up less senior engineers to more senior as they could not find anyone externally to fill the talent gap or anyone who wanted to do administrative engineering) for not being able to complete tasks which he never even got briefed on. Instead of the senior engineer owning up to lack of guidance and leadership skills, my colleague had to own up to it. I’m almost certain he left the company or is in the process of leaving. Another colleague of mine who was on the same program requested things such as WFH as he was the only one living a couple of hours away from work. Instead of empathizing, leadership labeled him as the “entitled millennial” which is interesting because the guy was one of the few people left in the program who actually got things done. Also, the definition of millennials goes back to about anyone born from 1981 to 1996 such that – ironically – most of the new leadership themselves are in fact millennials. I’m pretty sure the guy is no longer there and got picked up by a Tech company, what a shame. I knew an engineer in a more senior role who I seriously believed was on a track to be a manager or a director. Unfortunately they made him – and I couldn’t even believe this – literally sort papers in a 1940s shed (totally fiscally responsible to charge the government $300+/hr/engineer to file papers instead of hiring someone to sort and package them for $10/hr right?). Needless to say, he said that it was his first job at Lockheed and certainly his last. Some more red flags: 1) Program was awarded a 420M contract in 2017, in 2018 directors did not know how to utilize that money to get things sorted out and relocated from CA to CO. 2) Inexperience flows down from the top as I said, the whole buddy-buddy politics caused this to happen and now you have a bunch of unqualified people in a senior role. 3) Facility/infrastructure was so degraded that it’s questionable if it has ever been OSHA certified in the past decade. There were times were the smell would be extraordinary, or times we had no water to drink or no A/C and pipes broke due to lack of maintenance (one manager quit because a pipe burst on him, it was the most ridiculous thing I’ve seen)… Seriously, hope I didn’t get cancer from anything… It was much easier to see the world of difference between Defense and Tech in Silicon Valley by walking across the street and grabbing lunch on the Google campus. That was a wake-up call. And yes, if you are wondering, Google does have water, A/C, and electricity. 4) In 2018 they rolled out what they called Destination Wellbeing which announced higher deductible plans or something along the lines of “the company will no longer cover you for x, y, and z anymore, that’s on you”. This roll out got so much bad press that people were calling it “Destination Bankruptcy” and one of the SVPs had to step in, delete comments, and shut down their internal blog post (I mean… What else did they think was going to happen? Shows how out of touch the board members are with the rest of the company). Several of weeks later they literally had some SVP guy give a blog post about how great it is to be underpaid and have no benefits. It was something you certainly had to see to believe! 5) Lockheed’s inability to retain talent, effective leaders, and move quickly (actual design and development at Lockheed happens about once every 40 years...) causes competitors like SpaceX and Blue Origins to offer the government a better service at a lower price point while grabbing a bigger piece of the pie which was once Lockheed’s. What once was thought a stable company might not be stable several decades from now if this trend continues. There are some exceptions like the FBM program but as I said before, if you are a new grad, do you really want to work at a place that does not challenge you and you have to live with a product which was designed to basically (hopefully) never ever be used for the rest of your career? 6) To add to my previous bullet regarding productivity, there were many times when we would have 8+ person meetings were we charge the government $300+/hr/engineer just to debate how many columns an Excel Spreadsheet should have or how many slides a PowerPoint should have. Next thing you know the joke at the weekly staff meetings would be “how many Lockheed employees does it take to screw in a lightbulb and what’s the cost to the taxpayer per hour?” 7) Pay back in Silicon Valley was about 50% of what other engineers were being paid at Tech companies. If that doesn’t sound degrading to you I’m not sure what does. Lockheed only seems to be able to retain people who a) do not know their true market value b) are so blindly passionate about aerospace such that they are taken advantage of by upper leadership.
