Behind the times, slow, and often pigeon holed - R&D S&E, Computer Science Sandia National Laboratories Employee Review

I used to love Sandia and was going to consider it to be the place for my lifelong career, but sadly in recent years I've seen the cold hard truth. Sandia is afraid of change, and change only happens when it prevents impending doom. HR is a nightmare to work with, they often have strict policies that dont consider edge cases and end up drastically screwing up peoples careers and lives. There is a lot of legacy systems essentially on life support, its hard to convince teams to start refactoring these systems because "they just work, why would we update them?" But what has frustrated me the most and is ultimately the cause of me currently looking for a new job elsewhere is the pigeon holing that happens. People will be assigned a "You will do this and you will like it". This works for some people if they actually end up doing what their passion is, it of course is horrible for people who for example went to college to become a software engineer, love software engineering, want to do and did like software engineering, but are instead told to 100% focus on something else despite hating it because we are at headcount and no one else can do that. And then when you have spent 2 years in the gulag doing a role you do not like, and ask to go back to the role you like you get told "Sometimes in life you just have to do your time in something you dont like" ... okay but just remember it goes both ways - time to jump ship! If that analogy above sounded personal, its because it is. Regardless, im sure a lot of people can have lifelong fulfilling careers at Sandia. But, if you get pigeon holed and are suffering with no way out, dont waste your life just because Sandia is comfy. Also if you have to work in Albuquerque, you will either like it or hate it, but most hate it. Its a horrible city, rampant with crime and homelessness. The base is literally in the area the locals dub the "warzone".