General Dynamics Electric Boat reviews

Engineers are leaving in droves due to poor management and significantly below industry average pay. The raise pool is ~3.5% based on the total salary of a group and that is spread amongst all the people in the group. Top performers will be in the 4-6% range, which means even the best will take a pay cut most years due to inflation. The only group that sees a significant increase year over year is the amount they are willing to pay someone directly out of school. So much so that someone with a year of experience will immediately be getting paid less than a new hire the next hiring season, even after a merit raise. HR ignores most requests to improve pay to retain engineers and have only done large increases outside of merit twice, and even then it’s not enough to match the competition. When engineers get promoted to senior (4-5 years experience) here they just seem to lump them all in at the very bottom of the pay bracket ($82,000). This won’t last much longer since they are bringing in new E1s straight out of college around $75,000. The salary compression is insane and results in people being around $10,000 short of where they should be. Unnecessary stress is imposed on the engineers because of the lack of talent and results in a poor sense of work life balance. The company does not provide the tools to do a good job and management is still stuck in the 80s. The company is a perfect argument against unions when it comes to the MDA. It is a safe haven for poor performers who will ride out the union security blanket for years before retiring. There are a significant number of designers who should straight up be fired or be forced to retire. They get away with things that if an engineer did them they would be fired immediately. Overall this place is just a job, and not a career and it shows. Most people are not happy there and those who can are jumping ship to significantly better pay.

In general: PTO is not great, health plan is expensive, tuition reimbursement is essential nonexistent, parking is the worst I've ever seen, upper management does not care about the skills or feelings of their employees, you are watched like a hawk for clocking in and out (yes, full-time salaried engineers have a time clock here). In my 5 years at Electric Boat the benefits have deteriorated. When I started we were paid overtime, had parking at the New London facility, had ample sick time, PPO health plan, great tuition reimbursement. As of today the vacation policy was changed to remove sick time and paid paternity/maternity leave to PTO, parking is so bad that unless you arrive by 6:00am you are walking over a mile into work, the only available health insurance plan is a high deductible one and the tuition reimbursement for new hires is awful. The parking situation is so bad that most employees discuss it at least 1 hour each and every day. The PTO change resulted in many people coming to work with a cold or even the flu because time off is very valuable. The tuition policy used to allow engineers to enroll in an approved program and get a degree paid for by the company. Now, the amount per class they will cover is limited unless you have been at the company over 4 years before you start. It seems to be a system in place to assist those with no degree or to keep people locked in to the company for longer. So if you are coming out of college and want to pursue an advanced degree I would advise against choosing Electric Boat. Upper management really only cares about meeting arbitrary dates on a schedule and they pay way too much attention to the "time clock." Upper management doesn't value employee skills or abilities and views everyone as a "number." A few members of my immediate management were taken to HR by no less than 6 employees for bullying tactics and harassment (both sexual and non-sexual) and they are still in management roles performing the same jobs they did before. You can work 80 hours for 4 weeks straight to get a job done then work 39 hours another week and get scolded, harshly, for not putting in 40 hours. You can work 40 hours each and every week surfing the internet and get the same raise as someone who works 80 hours a week churning out product after product (maybe the raise will differ by 1%...maybe). Many experienced, senior level, employees have left and upper management did absolutely nothing to keep them: no raise, no promotion, not even a pat on the back. Lower management is highly inexperienced and incompetent. Most people are in management because they are "friends" with someone above them and got promoted to it. Nearly every supervisor is not qualified and almost every manager is just there as a stepping stone. They are out of touch with what real engineering is and really only care about meeting fake dates on a schedule. You are discouraged from transferring departments to the point where upper management will actively "lock" you into your current position not allowing you to try something else. Electric Boat is so desperate to hire people that as long as you have some kind of engineering or related degree you will get a job here. This results in a lot of people being here that can't count the number of fingers on their hands but will get promoted to management eventually anyway. I would highly recommend anyone thinking about applying here to heavily reconsider unless you meet one of the following criteria: - you have no other job opportunities - you are head over heels in love with southeast CT - you are near to retirement and want something stable for your last few years