Most everything about working at Hughes can cause one to question why they even worked there. From day one you will notice how most everyone is either looking to leave or they have no option to look elsewhere due to the small job market for this type of work in suburban Maryland.
Be careful in your interview, as most managers will lie to onboard you as fast as possible. There is a fire every day here, don't let the current fire make you feel like you need to act immediately and onboard as fast as possible.
I struggle to even call the benefits by that name. Health insurance here will only keep you from dying and it seems to get worse every year. Hughes cuts costs at every level so that the VPs and above can continue to pat their own backs, and if you know anything about GM style management from the early 2000s you know how many VPs a this company has. 401k match is standard. PTO allotment is standard but the execution is horrendous, as most employees have to use PTO just to balance their work hours within the week. The standard management practice is to only allow 8 hours of work each day and if you deviate you must use PTO. Working 10 hours one day and 6 hours the next is not allowed, as flex time is highly frowned upon. You can also only use PTO for week long vacations, or appending days to a weekend, otherwise management thinks you're lazy.
Employee attrition under 5 years has been an issue for the past 20 years, so you have an enormous gap between the new recruits and management, many of whom have no clue how to manage millenials or operate within a modern working environment. Management thinks all millenials are lazy, but in reality we are one of the most efficient generations ever, and efficiency is not prized here.
The "Fraternity Hazing" style of career growth is strong within this company, you put in your time and you go through the struggles everyone else did and you will inevitably reach management in 15-20 years. This leads to management who were the worst of the crop, having no clue how to lead, and had no ability to move to another job, leaving them to moving up the ranks. Everything here is meant to framed such that you are a "team player", this is used to make employees feel bad if they complain about their work, even if they want to help fix the issue.
If you have any sort of critical thinking skills, throw it out the window now, as they will not be prized, acknowledged, or accepted here, as management has made up it's mind by the time they ask you anything. Every manager in the middle is also powerless, leading many to question their roles, as even $1200 will need to be signed by your boss's boss's boss.
Management here is designed to manipulate you, they don't practice business externally between customers and vendors, they practice it internally between employees and various other segments of the company. If you are familiar with the divide and conquer scheme of ruling a populace then you know exactly how internal politics are handled here.
If you like new technology, look away from here. An engineer having a laptop is the exception to the rule, while the standard is a desktop, even when you travel between your office, coworkers offices, the lab, meetings, and reviews. If you've ever been in a design review where only the person presenting has a laptop, then you know the pain of working here. Most departments have a communal laptop that is often fought over. Lab equipment is older than most of the college recruits, some equipment too old to even have a floppy disk drive so you can transfer data.
If you can manage to put up with everything above, expect low pay clocked at the 25th percentile in terms of market value, and yearly raises that will be less than inflation unless you fight back. In a region as expensive as DC, and a company as demanding as this, you think they would pay better. If you're a talented engineer, expect to have to control the worker drones from day one, you will be a manager not by title, but by how you must complete you job effectively.
