12 ms·

My first internship was as a Sophomore CS student at Raytheon. I learned something life-changing that summer: I will never work at a defense contractor or large

My first internship was as a Sophomore CS student at Raytheon. I learned something life-changing that summer: I will never work at a defense contractor or large corporate behemoth. I think this was in part due to my over-stressed manager at the time saying "I remember college... it was the best time of my life..." as his voice drifted off in a nostalgic melancholy.

vaguesortof 7y ago
Not an uncommon experience for college...
oarabbus_ 7y ago
>I think this was in part due to my over-stressed manager at the time saying "I remember college... it was the best time of my life..." It's a pretty common trope that you'll hear people saying this regardless of industry. Is there anything else that lead you to feel you'll never work for a defense contractor?
- makerofspoons 7y ago
  Defense contractors have a huge spectrum of work- some projects will be horrible projects maintaining legacy products with outdated technology and numerous security flaws, some will be using cutting-edge technology and will involve innovative things. There is a lot of bureaucracy, they often move slow, and the pay is often below industry standards. The current backlog of security clearance applications (in the US) means it could take years before you're fully onboard your program, and means that hiring help takes forever as well. If you end up on a great program they can be rewarding places to work, it's just a matter of being careful about choosing your opportunities.
  - vonmoltke 7y ago
    > the pay is often below industry standards Is there any defense contractor that pays anywhere near industry standards?
    - souprock 7y ago
      It depends on who is judging. I recall that you were unemployed for quite a long time because nothing was up to your standard. This suggests that your impression of "industry standards" is inaccurate, at least for someone of your capability.
      - vonmoltke 7y ago
        You recall wrong. I haven't been unemployed since I graduated college 17 years ago.
    - i_am_proteus 7y ago
      /s Palantir. Honestly, though, defense contractor pay is less location-dependent because a lot of the jobs are billed through to the DOD. Defense jobs can even best the industry--- just not in major areas with high costs of livi g.
      - vonmoltke 7y ago
        I spent my time in the industry in Dallas, which is pretty close to the optimal balance of salary and metro area. My salary was not at industry averages. I remember, vaguely, Raytheon's salary bands. They weren't anything to write home about, and you were not getting anywhere near the top ends in a low COL location like Dallas.
    - tomohawk 7y ago
      During my career, defense contractors have generally paid a lot more with much more generous benefits (I've seen fully employer paid 401K plans to the IRS maximum), and have been a much more stable employer. Since contract work hours are billable, you generally get paid for each hour you work, unless you are working for the wrong company and only get a salary. This naturally limits extra hours to those that are truly needed, and leads to a good work/life balance.
      - vonmoltke 7y ago
        Other than stability, none of those applied to Raytheon while I was there. The 401k match was 6% which, while good, didn't even come to what my wife gets from her non-profit. I was paying 25% of my health coverage, which is the highest proportion if any of my five employers. (I will day, though, that Raytheon had the best family coverage rates of any of them.) I was salaried, and other than a few times was required to record no more than 40 hours in my timesheet regardless of how much time I needed to put in. The work/life balance was highly dependent on the program you were on, and I got trapped on a bad one.
  - pmorici 7y ago
    I don’t think the pay thing is true in general.
  - geomark 7y ago
    My experience at a big defense contractor was like that. Huge spectrum of work. Fortunately I got to work on some very cool cutting edge (at the time) technology. We were developing wafer scale integration, doing things like inter-reticle stitching to make chips the size of an entire 4 inch wafer (4 inch wafers were common at the time). Through on-chip redundancy/self-testing/configuration we were getting 50% yield. It was pretty amazing. But so many other engineers were using stone-aged technology to field satellite systems, working under hugely bloated management structures where easily 20% of your time was spent reporting and accounting for hours and costs. For quite a few years I was clever enough or lucky enough to avoid ever having to work one of those dinosaur projects.
    - jdsully 7y ago
      My god, the latency on a wafer sized die must have been incredible. Certainly such a beast wouldn't be used for logic... A 4 inch image sensor would be quite interesting though.
      - geomark 7y ago
        It was indeed logic. A pair of MACs, a pair of ALUs, big chunk of on-chip memory and a big ol' mess of wires to interconnect them all. Heavily pipelined. For use in signal processing applications where latency wasn't really a concern. We dabbled with big image sensor arrays but the sparing for yield was messy and we never came to grips with how to deal with the situation where the working sensors were in random locations in the array. It seemed to really mess up all the important systems level calculations. We also never completely worked out testing. The big logic chip had BILBO blocks so we could just put it in self test mode, run a lot of clock cycles, check the signatures, and switch in the working blocks. The sensor array needed more than that. Perhaps solvable issues, but we never got around to it.
        jdsully 7y ago
        Its really quite amazing how much more dense modern ASICs are.
  - exolymph 7y ago
    Interesting that you leaped to the experience of working at such an enterprise, rather than the ethics.
    - Kalium 7y ago
      This may come as a surprise, but a lot of military contracting is stuff that many people find ethically un-troublesome. Most people within a military contractor are not working on new ways to kill poor brown people a world away or how to spy on a dissident. Plenty are working on how to preserve food better, or how to keep birds away from runways more cheaply or effectively, or how to detect malware. Or monitoring groundwater for contamination. It could also be worth considering that anyone who makes the choice to work for such an employer has already reached ethical conclusions they are comfortable with.
- rxhernandez 7y ago
  I mean there are plenty of places that pay well, allow you to work from home and have no real set hours. Those places have made me feel like my best years were not at college.
- meter 7y ago
  I worked at Raytheon for almost 2 years, right out of college. I worked in R&D, which sounds cool, but essentially means that you’re project’s budget is at the whim of the highest-level executives, who are utterly out of touch with the engineers (looking at the org chart, they’re literally 7-8 levels above me). Because of that, EVERY single project that I was on was cancelled, due to budgetary reasons. The executives would get really excited about something new, and reallocate funds to new projects. Nothing ever got done. I saw zero projects get shipped. I never saw a customer - because there’s is no customer. There’s not even a government contract. It’s internal R&D.
  - karthikb 7y ago
    That's R&D in any industry. The question you're answering is not directly "how can we address what the customer needs today" but instead "what does basic science allow us to make within the purview of our company?"
- the_jeremy 7y ago
  I worked at a defense contractor, and aside from poorly managed bureaucracy (I submitted my clearance paperwork to Northrop, but Northrop didn't submit it externally for over a year), the main drag was being a company that billed the government hourly, which meant subtle / not-so-subtle cues to avoid cost underruns to the government by doing your job too quickly.
  - civility 7y ago
    That bothered me for a while until I figured it out. After a while, I learned that underspent projects are your opportunity to learn new things, mentor junior people, and provide cushion to people waiting for their next projects. The only thing I ever got reprimanded for was not spending my money - there are much harder problems to solve than that.
- gehwartzen 7y ago
  Not OP, but I spent a decent amount of time working for Honeywell's armor industry. On of the things that caused me to quit was the unspoken but very palpable excitement exhibited by higher level managers every time a conflict was brewing somewhere in the world (it almost didn't matter who was involved, some side involved was almost always buying our products). It's not a very morally uplifting environment.
klodolph 7y ago
The people I know who work at defense contractors say that there's basically a cycle of new hires that come in, hate working there, and then leave quickly. Only a certain percentage of hires tolerate the environment. The particular complaints I heard were all about bureaucracy, time tracking, accountability, etc. I can sympathize, but I know some people with the right personality type who thrive in that environment.
- xiaolingxiao 7y ago
  what kind of personality types?
  - klodolph 7y ago
    Some people are okay with doing everything "by the book" even when it's slow / inefficient. Estimating how long each project will take, and then tracking each hour you spend on the project. This is necessary for billing. Sending your work to the right person for review. Defense has rules around supply chain enforcement. Everything you do has to be auditable. Some people can't stand living under that kind of microscope, with such rigid rules and procedures. Some people struggle to be productive in this environment, even though they are perfectly productive in other environments. Same thing applies to other environments... some personality types won't usually thrive at small companies, but do well at large companies, and vice versa.
    - outworlder 7y ago
      I am not even sure if there is anyone that would like working on such environment. They are not designed to be productive and in fact tend to work against anyone who actually wants to get work done. But you bet that they are the first to punish workers for some perceived 'unproductivity' according to whatever random metric the consulting company came up with. This is not solely relegated to the defense industry - the financial industry tends to come up with this sort of thing as well.
      - klodolph 7y ago
goodmattg 7y ago
I had the same experience! Sophomore EE (signals) internship at Raytheon. While I had the same reaction as you at the time, my thinking has evolved a bit. I can see why a subset of people enjoy working there. The problems are difficult, the work is 'meaningful' (many of my coworkers had family in the military), and the pace is deliberate. I met 60 year-old guys writing firmware for fighter jets and they loved it. The culture is the exact opposite of "move fast and break things" - you may write 10 lines of code a week, but those are some exceedingly important lines.
- starpilot 7y ago
  In defense, you have lower pay, but also better job security and less age discrimination. You'll never have to brush up on how to reverse a linked list. It's also a very 9 to 5 job, there's no oncall for systems that are largely offline, and rarely is there Agile. You put in your hours and clock out for the day.
  - newen 7y ago
    The government makes these companies keep track of their hours for audit purposes. So while some rare people may work overtime and not log their hours, there is really no culture of working long hours there.
  - tomohawk 7y ago
    Generally defense contracts pay very well, and pay hourly. Benefits are usually generous. Work is generally 40 hours a week, but if it is more for some reason, you get paid for each extra hour. If this is not your deal, you're working for the wrong company. Age discrimination is generally much less, but can be a problem on certain contracts. Sometimes the government thinks they'll save a bundle by getting less experienced people to do the work. They usually repent of that the next time a contract comes out. The experienced / good people can always find another contract to go to. I've seen all manner of processes from very well done agile, to poorly done agile, to waterfall, to no process at all. On call depends on the contract, but is not typical.
    - 7y ago
rdiddly 7y ago
Too many variables to isolate there. It might've had surprisingly little to do with work. He might've just been feeling the cumulative effects of driving his crappy commute home to his too-big house, car-payment, mortgage-payment, spoiled-rotten kids and wife, lawn that needs mowing and gutters that need cleaning. For a lot of people college will be the last time they're not laboring under the full burden of all that stuff.
manigandham 7y ago
A lot of people say that. Being in college while young, hopeful, newly independent, without major responsibilities, and close together with thousands of others creating lifelong friendships really is one of the best times of many people's lives.

vaguesortof 7y ago

Not an uncommon experience for college...

oarabbus_ 7y ago

>I think this was in part due to my over-stressed manager at the time saying "I remember college... it was the best time of my life..." It's a pretty common trope that you'll hear people saying this regardless of industry. Is there anything else that lead you to feel you'll never work for a defense contractor?

makerofspoons 7y ago
Defense contractors have a huge spectrum of work- some projects will be horrible projects maintaining legacy products with outdated technology and numerous security flaws, some will be using cutting-edge technology and will involve innovative things. There is a lot of bureaucracy, they often move slow, and the pay is often below industry standards. The current backlog of security clearance applications (in the US) means it could take years before you're fully onboard your program, and means that hiring help takes forever as well. If you end up on a great program they can be rewarding places to work, it's just a matter of being careful about choosing your opportunities.
- vonmoltke 7y ago
  > the pay is often below industry standards Is there any defense contractor that pays anywhere near industry standards?
  - souprock 7y ago
    It depends on who is judging. I recall that you were unemployed for quite a long time because nothing was up to your standard. This suggests that your impression of "industry standards" is inaccurate, at least for someone of your capability.
    - vonmoltke 7y ago
      You recall wrong. I haven't been unemployed since I graduated college 17 years ago.
  - i_am_proteus 7y ago
    /s Palantir. Honestly, though, defense contractor pay is less location-dependent because a lot of the jobs are billed through to the DOD. Defense jobs can even best the industry--- just not in major areas with high costs of livi g.
    - vonmoltke 7y ago
      I spent my time in the industry in Dallas, which is pretty close to the optimal balance of salary and metro area. My salary was not at industry averages. I remember, vaguely, Raytheon's salary bands. They weren't anything to write home about, and you were not getting anywhere near the top ends in a low COL location like Dallas.
  - tomohawk 7y ago
    During my career, defense contractors have generally paid a lot more with much more generous benefits (I've seen fully employer paid 401K plans to the IRS maximum), and have been a much more stable employer. Since contract work hours are billable, you generally get paid for each hour you work, unless you are working for the wrong company and only get a salary. This naturally limits extra hours to those that are truly needed, and leads to a good work/life balance.
    - vonmoltke 7y ago
      Other than stability, none of those applied to Raytheon while I was there. The 401k match was 6% which, while good, didn't even come to what my wife gets from her non-profit. I was paying 25% of my health coverage, which is the highest proportion if any of my five employers. (I will day, though, that Raytheon had the best family coverage rates of any of them.) I was salaried, and other than a few times was required to record no more than 40 hours in my timesheet regardless of how much time I needed to put in. The work/life balance was highly dependent on the program you were on, and I got trapped on a bad one.
- pmorici 7y ago
  I don’t think the pay thing is true in general.
- geomark 7y ago
  My experience at a big defense contractor was like that. Huge spectrum of work. Fortunately I got to work on some very cool cutting edge (at the time) technology. We were developing wafer scale integration, doing things like inter-reticle stitching to make chips the size of an entire 4 inch wafer (4 inch wafers were common at the time). Through on-chip redundancy/self-testing/configuration we were getting 50% yield. It was pretty amazing. But so many other engineers were using stone-aged technology to field satellite systems, working under hugely bloated management structures where easily 20% of your time was spent reporting and accounting for hours and costs. For quite a few years I was clever enough or lucky enough to avoid ever having to work one of those dinosaur projects.
  - jdsully 7y ago
    My god, the latency on a wafer sized die must have been incredible. Certainly such a beast wouldn't be used for logic... A 4 inch image sensor would be quite interesting though.
    - geomark 7y ago
      It was indeed logic. A pair of MACs, a pair of ALUs, big chunk of on-chip memory and a big ol' mess of wires to interconnect them all. Heavily pipelined. For use in signal processing applications where latency wasn't really a concern. We dabbled with big image sensor arrays but the sparing for yield was messy and we never came to grips with how to deal with the situation where the working sensors were in random locations in the array. It seemed to really mess up all the important systems level calculations. We also never completely worked out testing. The big logic chip had BILBO blocks so we could just put it in self test mode, run a lot of clock cycles, check the signatures, and switch in the working blocks. The sensor array needed more than that. Perhaps solvable issues, but we never got around to it.
      - jdsully 7y ago
        Its really quite amazing how much more dense modern ASICs are.
- exolymph 7y ago
  Interesting that you leaped to the experience of working at such an enterprise, rather than the ethics.
  - Kalium 7y ago
    This may come as a surprise, but a lot of military contracting is stuff that many people find ethically un-troublesome. Most people within a military contractor are not working on new ways to kill poor brown people a world away or how to spy on a dissident. Plenty are working on how to preserve food better, or how to keep birds away from runways more cheaply or effectively, or how to detect malware. Or monitoring groundwater for contamination. It could also be worth considering that anyone who makes the choice to work for such an employer has already reached ethical conclusions they are comfortable with.
rxhernandez 7y ago
I mean there are plenty of places that pay well, allow you to work from home and have no real set hours. Those places have made me feel like my best years were not at college.
meter 7y ago
I worked at Raytheon for almost 2 years, right out of college. I worked in R&D, which sounds cool, but essentially means that you’re project’s budget is at the whim of the highest-level executives, who are utterly out of touch with the engineers (looking at the org chart, they’re literally 7-8 levels above me). Because of that, EVERY single project that I was on was cancelled, due to budgetary reasons. The executives would get really excited about something new, and reallocate funds to new projects. Nothing ever got done. I saw zero projects get shipped. I never saw a customer - because there’s is no customer. There’s not even a government contract. It’s internal R&D.
- karthikb 7y ago
  That's R&D in any industry. The question you're answering is not directly "how can we address what the customer needs today" but instead "what does basic science allow us to make within the purview of our company?"
the_jeremy 7y ago
I worked at a defense contractor, and aside from poorly managed bureaucracy (I submitted my clearance paperwork to Northrop, but Northrop didn't submit it externally for over a year), the main drag was being a company that billed the government hourly, which meant subtle / not-so-subtle cues to avoid cost underruns to the government by doing your job too quickly.
- civility 7y ago
  That bothered me for a while until I figured it out. After a while, I learned that underspent projects are your opportunity to learn new things, mentor junior people, and provide cushion to people waiting for their next projects. The only thing I ever got reprimanded for was not spending my money - there are much harder problems to solve than that.
gehwartzen 7y ago
Not OP, but I spent a decent amount of time working for Honeywell's armor industry. On of the things that caused me to quit was the unspoken but very palpable excitement exhibited by higher level managers every time a conflict was brewing somewhere in the world (it almost didn't matter who was involved, some side involved was almost always buying our products). It's not a very morally uplifting environment.

klodolph 7y ago

The people I know who work at defense contractors say that there's basically a cycle of new hires that come in, hate working there, and then leave quickly. Only a certain percentage of hires tolerate the environment. The particular complaints I heard were all about bureaucracy, time tracking, accountability, etc. I can sympathize, but I know some people with the right personality type who thrive in that environment.

xiaolingxiao 7y ago
what kind of personality types?
- klodolph 7y ago
  Some people are okay with doing everything "by the book" even when it's slow / inefficient. Estimating how long each project will take, and then tracking each hour you spend on the project. This is necessary for billing. Sending your work to the right person for review. Defense has rules around supply chain enforcement. Everything you do has to be auditable. Some people can't stand living under that kind of microscope, with such rigid rules and procedures. Some people struggle to be productive in this environment, even though they are perfectly productive in other environments. Same thing applies to other environments... some personality types won't usually thrive at small companies, but do well at large companies, and vice versa.
  - outworlder 7y ago
    I am not even sure if there is anyone that would like working on such environment. They are not designed to be productive and in fact tend to work against anyone who actually wants to get work done. But you bet that they are the first to punish workers for some perceived 'unproductivity' according to whatever random metric the consulting company came up with. This is not solely relegated to the defense industry - the financial industry tends to come up with this sort of thing as well.
    - klodolph 7y ago

goodmattg 7y ago

I had the same experience! Sophomore EE (signals) internship at Raytheon. While I had the same reaction as you at the time, my thinking has evolved a bit. I can see why a subset of people enjoy working there. The problems are difficult, the work is 'meaningful' (many of my coworkers had family in the military), and the pace is deliberate. I met 60 year-old guys writing firmware for fighter jets and they loved it. The culture is the exact opposite of "move fast and break things" - you may write 10 lines of code a week, but those are some exceedingly important lines.

starpilot 7y ago
In defense, you have lower pay, but also better job security and less age discrimination. You'll never have to brush up on how to reverse a linked list. It's also a very 9 to 5 job, there's no oncall for systems that are largely offline, and rarely is there Agile. You put in your hours and clock out for the day.
- newen 7y ago
  The government makes these companies keep track of their hours for audit purposes. So while some rare people may work overtime and not log their hours, there is really no culture of working long hours there.
- tomohawk 7y ago
  Generally defense contracts pay very well, and pay hourly. Benefits are usually generous. Work is generally 40 hours a week, but if it is more for some reason, you get paid for each extra hour. If this is not your deal, you're working for the wrong company. Age discrimination is generally much less, but can be a problem on certain contracts. Sometimes the government thinks they'll save a bundle by getting less experienced people to do the work. They usually repent of that the next time a contract comes out. The experienced / good people can always find another contract to go to. I've seen all manner of processes from very well done agile, to poorly done agile, to waterfall, to no process at all. On call depends on the contract, but is not typical.
  - 7y ago

rdiddly 7y ago

Too many variables to isolate there. It might've had surprisingly little to do with work. He might've just been feeling the cumulative effects of driving his crappy commute home to his too-big house, car-payment, mortgage-payment, spoiled-rotten kids and wife, lawn that needs mowing and gutters that need cleaning. For a lot of people college will be the last time they're not laboring under the full burden of all that stuff.

manigandham 7y ago

A lot of people say that. Being in college while young, hopeful, newly independent, without major responsibilities, and close together with thousands of others creating lifelong friendships really is one of the best times of many people's lives.