Lockheed Martin Software Engineer reviews

I came to Lockheed directly from college with a degree in computer science. I've been with the company for about a year, and here is my experience: 1) For a great majority of my time here, I had absolutely nothing to do. That's right, I'm being paid to just sit in my office and "wait" for some someone to assign some work. There were a number of people just like me, just wandering around the halls, hanging out in the labs with nothing to do. To make matters worse, they would still hire more people into the program to fill vacant positions, which makes no sense. 2) When I did have work, it usually involved trivial things like updating documentation, updating some records in a database, etc. At first I thought this was just overhead for some bigger project that the team I was on was working on. As it turned out, my whole team's job was to simple manage some word documents and keep them updated, and do other vary trivial tasks. This was all, like a slap in the face to me coming from a computer science background and having actually solved real world problems. The worst part is that most of the people on my team carried the title of "Software Engineer". In fact, my manager's title was "Senior Software Engineering Mngr", but I doubt they knew anything about software (Other than using Microsoft Office). 3) There is subtle slogan around the company "Selling yesterday's technologies at tomorrow prices". That is so right, and accurately describes Lockheed (at least IS&GS). 4) Since I started, people have been leaving the company on a regular basis. Most of the new hires that I started with lasted a few months and then quit, mainly for the same reasons listed above. 5) The most useful skill that I was able to apply to my job in my time here was my Microsoft Office skills. If I knew that I would be doing this, I would not have gone to one of the best engineering schools in the country, I would have gone to Devry instead.

You will be passed over for promotion if you are not one of the "good old boys". There are lots of actively operating quid pro quo relationships. People are rewarded for kissing up and personal relationships. They do not have a reliable HR that cares about what is reported to them--they often turn the other cheek. Mid-level management runs that place, regardless of what the upper level management thinks or what their mission statements are. Mid-level management routinely encourages unethical practices, esp wrt charging time to government contracts.