A big issue, and surprise to many new employees, is that DRS is not really a 10,000 + employee company. It's really a collection of many small companies, each essentially independent islands. What the means to you is that even if there are 400 engineers of your type (electrical, software, etc.) at DRS as a whole, but only 4 in your division - those 4 are the only ones you get to talk with. That has a huge impact on your ability to draw on the pool of knowledge at DRS. It's very possible there are resources that might be able to help you with a tricky technical problem, but you will never find them. Because of this, I get the impression we are constantly reinventing the wheel, and not always using the best design.
Another issue I see, at least on my island, is that here is very little organized effort to enhance the skills and knowledge of the engineering staff. For an organization supposedly providing advanced defense technology, we seem to be about a decade behind the curve on process and technology innovation. There also seems to be a remarkable amount of stubbornness, or maybe fear, on the part of more senior engineers to move on to new technologies or methodologies. I’m not sure why, but it seems to be some sort of pervasive cultural behavior.
