Pros
Good benefits Enjoy working with Govt. customers. Engineering staff is supportive of one another (on a regional basis) Company will pay for graduate work if you take the initiative For me: close to family which is why I'm here
Cons
Massive amounts of management overhead -- not uncommon to have 3 to 5 management types that you have to status (sometimes everyday). Getting permission to publish an article takes 6 signatures across 3 states. Terrible physical facilities; old buzzing lights, 40 year old cube furniture (the QA stamp on my surface says "April, 1971"), building vibrations you can see in the surface of your coffee. The situation is made worse by executive leadership constantly updating their offices. Complaints are usually met with "Well you should have seen it in 1977 when people back here smoked." It's 2011 guys, maybe we should raise the bar a bit. Note that most of the complaints here are specific to the North Texas area. CA and MA look more like the recruitment videos. Morale is not great; again, sense is that executives are the only true employees, the rest of us are just a way to bill hours. Even little things like executive staff getting small sinks in their areas while engineers have to trek water from the bathroom for coffee brings home just how little engineering means to management. Constant cramming of employees into ever smaller spaces reduces productivity (ever try to debug a problem across multiple parallel threads while 50 people around you are chatting?) Caste system in engineering -- EE at top, software at bottom. If you can't solder it or take a wrench to it, executives really have no idea what you're doing. This is reflected in resource allocation. As an EE you'll get a nicer pc, nicer cube, etc. Note you'll still be treking to the bathroom to get water for coffee, so it's not all suger and spice. (spice, get it?) No training for new employees -- you get more training as a new employee at Starbucks than you do at Raytheon. If the Govt. doesn't pay for something, it just doesn't happen. Not uncommon to have people with the company 5 to 10 years and still not understand engineering process. Bias against the "fly over" states. Executives / leadership sit on the coasts for the most part. Not uncommon for senior staff to still be more loyal to their old (non-existent) companies than to Raytheon; e.g. there are a lot of Hughes, E-Systems, and TI-DSEG engineers, but very, very few Raytheon engineers. A lot of the staff is RIP'd (Retired In Place). At 40-something I'm the youngest in most of my meetings. Far too many people are waiting to start their pension (the longer you stay the more you get). The company owns every idea you produce. As one Raytheon attorney put it "if you create a new fishing lure in your garage with 3 buddies, Raytheon owns 33%". This is standard in corporate America, but still depressing. Very little incentive to push new ideas forward, especially if they are not in Raytheon's traditional product list. Again, like most companies, Raytheon innovates through M&A. Raytheon is not a single company, but a loose coalition of Govt. programs. Understand that above all. For engineering, your career depends on the program you're attached to.
