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.
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contractors have a huge spectrum of work- some projects will be horrible projects maintaining legacy products with outdated technology and numerous security flaws, some will be using cutting-edge technology and will involve innovative things.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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Some parts make you pay 0% of health coverage. It varies.
If you were told to record no more than 40 hours in my timesheet, then that means you DO NOT put in more than 40 hours. You're supposed to go home. If you were told to stay and this was for a government contract, it's a violation that you're supposed to report. Unless this was decades ago, you got training that told you so.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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?"
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
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.
Less than 0.1% of software jobs are FANG. This is not a sensible comparison.
Picking something more normal, Tesla pays software developers just $78k to $147k. Raytheon can beat that. This is without even trying to adjust for hours (a 9-to-5 place, or Elon Musk cracking the whip) or the fact that Raytheon locations typically have a far lower cost of living. Just on raw numbers, totally unadjusted, Raytheon wins.
More "normal"? Are we looking at whether it pays "normal" or pays "very well"? Don't get me wrong, in the world of all jobs, a defense job is really good, stable, and comfortable. Good to raise family on and have balance. In the world of tech, it's barely mediocre and the lack of stock options, bonus, or any perks to speak of (often not even free coffee) make them struggle to attract the best CS talent. Google pays very well in this field.
There is "very well" and then there is "statistical anomaly".
Google pays almost nobody. The whole firm, called Alphabet, has just 98,771 full-time employees. Most of those are not really "in the world of tech" though, with many devoted to stuff like marketing and human resources. It looks like about 40,000 are engineering talent, but not all of that will be software.
There are over 40 million software developers. At most, about 1 in 1000 work at Google. Again this assumes that all the technical staff at Alphabet is software developers working for Google, but that assumption is clearly wrong. There are hardware people working on cars and phones and more.
That 0.1% is practically nothing. Approximately nobody works for Google. It is just crazy to use Google as a standard for tech pay.
It's like asking why an athlete would be a gym teacher when the NFL pays so much better. It's like asking why a person would give kids private music lessons when you can make so much more money singing like Madonna. It's like asking why a person would be a mayor instead of being the US president.
Furthermore...
You are incorrect about the benefits being offered at defense contractors. Some do have free food, bonuses, decent pay, and even stock options. I've gotten all those things at defense contractors. Another advantage is a 40-hour work week. Another advantage of many defense contractors (not all) is that your coworkers are trustworthy American citizens who don't behave erratically; they have all passed a background check.
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.
To elaborate on why the job security is so good, it's because of the clearance system. During the internship, my manager said that if I wanted to come back next summer I would have to get top-secret (TS) clearance. Almost everyone working there has at least secret (S) or TS clearance. Getting clearance takes ~1 year WITH an employer backing you, and it may take years (a.k.a impossible) without one. So once you're in the system with clearance, you can bounce around the def-sec world forever.
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.
IBM Clearcase. Horribly underfunded IT departments. Hugely out of date tools and software design patterns. Tons of extra security constraints on employees for no extra compensation.
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.
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.
>I am not even sure if there is anyone that would like working on such environment.
I worked as a developer at a large bank and it had a very similar environment. I enjoyed it a lot, and I absolutely despise startup culture.
Some things that I personally enjoyed:
- In general older coworkers from academic backgrounds, more diverse, more grounded. The one gig I had a small startup felt like boyscout summercamp.
- no marketing, no attention seeking, no childish competition, work focussed on actual work. People left when the workday was over.
- Generally interesting technical challenges, not really consumer facing, very little fuzz about the newest frameworks or management styles or whatever, progress was measured, teamwork was valued over individualism.
- Very reliable career opportunities. If you do well you have a career to look forward to, no rapid up and down or hopping around.
I am sure people can be productive in this environment, I personally know some who currently work as defense contractors. You have some good hypotheticals, but much of the environment is driven by legal compliance rather than misguided management.
It’s not that defense is inherently toxic or good, I’d like to be clear what I’m saying. I’m saying that whatever good or bad management you have, there is a ton of legal compliance you have to deal with on top of that. So the baseline level of frustration an bureaucracy is higher than what you might be used to, even with good management. But this makes sense! Development OF COURSE slows down as soon as you are, say, building something that will affect whether somebody lives or dies.
Some amazing, skilled, productive engineers work in defense.
Same with medical technology. They tell stories of the Therac-25 to scare people away in college, and in spite of that, people are still willing to put in the work to make new radiotherapy devices, even with all the red tape.
They tend to also be good at gaming metrics so that higher ups will think they are good at their jobs. Meanwhile, only the absolutely minimal amount of work gets done.
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.
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.
