BA AI make sales commitments they do not have the engineering capacity to deliver, yet cracking the whip on the engineering teams all the way to unrealistic deadlines. Unpaid overtime is standard and expected, morale is unsurprisingly low and engineering staff turnover is high.
BAE AI used to be Detica, and the Detica heritage remains as this is still a project company not a product company. They chase quick-wins to maximise profits and continually change direction as a new prospect emerges, rather than focusing on developing a market-leading product.
Engineering decisions required to build a quality, supportable, maintainable product are all too frequently traded off against short-term project ‘wins’, which results in a poorly engineered, fragile product with significant technical debt and therefore is the maintenance nightmare you’d expect.
Project (not product) delivery is consistently prioritised over and above product quality and above people, and has been for several years according to my team. People’s health, motivation and happiness suffer as a direct result. Morale is generally at rock bottom and currently engineering within BAE AI is not a pleasant place to work. In fairness, I don’t believe this is what senior management want, specifically I know they have communicated a strong desire for quality to matter and be a priority, and for staff to matter. However, somewhere between the top and the ‘bottom’ at the engineering level this message gets completely removed.
The engineering teams have the know-how to build a quality product but are not given the authority to do what is required, yet somehow the responsibility of hitting or missing deadlines slips off the shoulders of middle management and onto the unempowered engineering team.
To survive here you need be able to not care about how anything is run. If you care not just about building the right thing but also about building the thing right, then BAE is not the place for you (or me).
