Company culture. On my first day there was a team meeting that quickly erupted into yelling. My manager called me afterwards to say "well, that's engineering" and try to laugh it off. I've never been a particularly angry person, but I've gotten into the really bad habit of hitting my desk when I get angry now (mostly from tech issues, because the RTX VPN and laptops they give out are absolutely terrible). The culture rubs off on you and it's really hard not to let it.
As the title says, everything is constantly top priority. Because of this, no one knows what to actually focus their efforts on so nothing gets done. I don't know if we've had a single proposal on time my entire time working for the company. Because of this, Program Managers will try to make deadlines earlier to give more wiggle room but those are unrealistic so they get missed too. Estimators will complain to us (proposal analysts) and all we can really do is say "yeah this is really unreasonable, by the way where are X, Y, and Z, because the program manager keeps messaging me every 30 minutes asking for it". Terribly understaffed to get anything done.
Management doesn't care. They have these "Finance Town Hall" meetings, where they explain the current state of the company and have RTX finance employees submit questions to management. At the last one, underpayment, lack of raises and promotions, mental health issues, and understaffing got brought up in separate questions. The Management's response for nearly every question was 'we are competitive for our industry' and 'this really isn't an issue'. It was extremely disheartening to have all of our concerns brushed aside so casually, but I guess that's par for the course.
You're working well past your 40 hour weeks. One of the benefits of being salary for most places is although you don't get overtime, you might run a little low on work some days and get to head out early if there's nothing really needed. The trade off of course is that if there's a lot to be done, you might finish late and work past the 40 hr week. At RTX though, the timecard is set up so you're at minimum working 40 hours every week, and unable to list more than 40 hours even if you worked it. At the end of every workday, you have to log in to the timecard and list everything you worked on that day down to the sixth minute (so 6 minutes would be 0.1). The kicker is, any time not spent working on a proposal (so checking emails, attending meetings, mandatory training sessions), must be charged to overhead. When your raise and bonus are calculated at the end of the year, if you have high overhead you will be penalized. So if you want your meager 3% raise, you have to not only work a minimum of the 40 hours (and the extra 20 minutes each day figuring out what you spent your time on), but also try to work past whatever you did during those 8 hours that was charged to overhead so you can instead charge the time to a proposal. Mind you, this is monitored extremely closely and we commonly get aggressive emails saying "you charged 0.2 of an hour on this proposal last week. Explain what you did and CC who authorized your work". My SO keeps saying I should go to the labor board about it because I'm consistently working crazy hours and getting upset calls and messages asking for things to get done, but RTX is clever and because it's not "really" mandatory for you to do anything, it just doesn't seem worth trying anything and sullying my name. I know how it might sound, but I'm really a hard worker and I believe in putting my all in my work. It's just disheartening and continually met with angry responses about it not being enough. Also, you're working with RTX groups across the nation and in different timezones. Don't hold your breath for them to think about what time it's by you. I started having to put my phone in "do not disturb" so I would stop getting calls at 4 in the morning, or late at night. If people feel so inclined to work at midnight (which happens far too often), it might be helpful to know not everyone else is. Also, you get the standard PTO package (2 wk vacation, 1 wk sick). You can only carry over 40 hrs per year though, and it does not get paid out - basically if you don't use it, it disappears. Unfortunately, this seems to happen for almost everyone I've seen at the company, including myself. During down time, my manager has recommended that we use PTO if we want to leave early in a day (even if the day before you worked 12 hours). So your "vacation time" is really not vacation.
Continual mass exodus. Employees aren't happy and it shows. They have employee satisfaction surveys before our all hands meetings and for some reason they never show the results. About two months into me working at my position, a coworker asked dejectedly at a small meeting if there was any room for advancement in the near future. After being told no by our manager, he left that month. People are leaving left and right, and we aren't able to hold on to new people. We keep trying to hire for new positions, and the applicants either deny the offer, we get told overhead is too high and we have to freeze hiring, or the new hires leave right away. The thing is, no one blames them. It's become a celebration when people get to leave, and we send congratulatory messages and write recommendations. I've told numerous coworkers I'd happily be a reference for them, because people are working incredibly hard but not being met with benefits for it.
Technology is terrible and outdated. For a company with "Technologies" written in the title, you'd think (or hope) that you might not be forced to use Internet Explorer for 90% of the work. You'd be wrong though. We're all stuck on Internet Explorer, using a VPN that crashes every hour when the internet gets just a bit too slow, having Excel files fail to load and crash the whole laptop, etc. It's my biggest and most common frustration. Yes, I asked and got my RAM upgraded. The effect has seemed to be minimal. They have us on i5-8350Us and it's enough to make my SO laugh when they go over its specs. Also, many of the older employees are very tech-unsavvy and for one reason or another it has been falling on us proposal analysts to be their IT support. I had to screenshare with an engineer and show him how to COPY AND PASTE. The issue is, promotions are based on time rather than skill. He's been here forever and never needed to do it himself. People get so. lazy. As a proposal analyst you review basis of estimates. The amount of time I have spent opening a BOE to have it say "error code XXXX" submitted for approval because they didn't bother to proofread it, or have it be coherent until the last step where it says "5 hours per month * 10 months = 742 hours" so it lines up with their estimate and they don't need to revise drives me crazy. But for so many people, why would they put in effort to have it constantly be asked why A and not A+ when allowance is anything above a C.
Incredibly frustrating work environment. I mean, I've worked fast food, labor, retail, internships, etc. and never really complained. This is just a terrible company to work for in my experience. I really didn't want to write a review, but my SO convinced me that this is the right thing to do, to help warn anyone hoping on making a long term career here. Some people thrive in this type of environment, I'm just not one of them.
