----- Assigned work is a gamble.
Being successful here is 50% talent, and 50% luck (of getting good work assigned for you to do)
Some people get a good, high profile task on a well organized and run program, with plenty of funding... These people get recognition, praise, awards, cash bonuses, high ratings during annual review, which leads to their promotions into higher salary grades.
Some people, however, get stuck on an underfunded, disorganized program which is badly managed with unrealistic expectations. Obviously, such a program does not produce good results (regardless of the engineer's skills or abilities) and it looks bad on the engineer part. This translates to no awards, no praise, bad annual reviews, and this eventually leads to being passed up for promotions.
(I've been on both sides of this fence, and have seen same happen to co-workers and friends)
A person can work one year on a crappy program, and stall his career. The next year they can do the exact same quality of work on a good program, and get a huge boost to their career. The problem is that tasks are handed out to people by management, and its usually just a case of "right place at the right time".... if you are getting off a program and there is another program that needs a person...you'll be that person. To some degree, managers have control over who gets assigned to what program, but for the most part, they just fill openings with people as they become available, so I can't really blame management for this.
------ Politics
There are some politics here. Managers and supervisors have an "in-crowd" of people, who seem to get more "perks" these can range from getting the first chance to sign up for a limited capacity of an interesting course/training (to help further their career), to others being asked to go to industry and trade conferences, and sometimes, getting first pick at some real interesting new task becoming available.
------ Middle and Upper Management
They seem to be a group of friends who just rotate around in same jobs, with different titles every time there is a re-org. These people all have a history of working together a long time ago at some same company, and even their families are friends with each other...its likely that if you are not a part of this circle, it would be hard to get in.
----- Atmosphere and People
Being a defense contractor, you can expect most of the people here to be pretty politically conservative. If you are not...it may be wise to keep your views to yourself. Even though everyone is 'educated' there are even a few 'rednecks' who are just ignorant and borderline racist.
