Lockheed Martin reviews about "manager"

Low pay, old tech, managers that know nothing

Lots of red tape and bureaucracy in general. Division of labor can slow down productiveness.

- Managers and senior management don't really care about career development that isn't leadership track (climbing the ladder to make the most money is more important) - Contract work makes it so you could have nothing to do one quarter but then drowning in work the next - Career growth is stunted by lack of funding for training and mentors being too busy to help or to provide 1-on-1 skill development - If you don't have a Top Secret clearance (that requires a polygraph test??) you will have almost no programs to work on, and management won't help you find any unclassified work

You work on cool stuff but the work you contribute to that cool thing isn't always as cool or interesting as the system at large, this is particularly true for early-career employees. Getting promoted in your current group can be difficult if not altogether impossible (unless you get a competing offer and that point why stay wit the company?). For timely promotions, it is necessary to move around quite a bit. Because of those aforementioned difficulties, turnover can be high in certain salary grades (and on certain programs if the budget is tight) and I have seen many talented Engineers leave due to this slow rolling. Other than that the cons are pretty much typical of other Defense behemoths, siloing, cumbersome process, etc.

I have no cons for the company

Some legacy managers expect you to work unpaid overtime after reaching a certain level. Younger generations aren't getting pensions though.

Horrible HDHP healthcare plan that is somehow still expensive.

There's a rumor that some managers weren't great at engineering and thus "failed up to management". I might have experienced some of this and it gave me the opposite feeling I listed in the "pros" section. Many "flight" projects are "legacy" and thus very slow moving. You can't just design something new and launch it into space on the government dime. So a lot of what gets done is certifying, asking people to approve, tending to flight details. A flight design could take years to get launched. However, I soon found that designing manufacturing hardware was faster and thus more fun. Still, it could easily take 6 months+ to push designs through review boards and such. Some aspects of satellite design were pretty top down. For example, each team was given a weight budget. If they made their budget everything is okay. As a designer I could have shaved off some weight pretty easily on a few projects. I typically requested to do so, but was met with indifference or opposition because we were already under budget. If it were less top down I'm sure lots of little improvements could be made. I see the reason for this but was a little annoyed at the time not to push this high performance hardware to "high performance".