Management has no practical engineering experience
There is little to no care about the product being sold.
Only way to make money is to move up into management. Directly contradicting one of the company’s hero’s own rules of engineering.
The product is the number 3 priority in the company’s book. Number one is selling a story to the customer. Number two is making money by nepotism.
Horizontal integration has all but destroyed the innovativeness of this company. Real engineers either leave the industry, go work for an up and coming competitor, or become a supplier.
Hiring processes are a joke. Even if a good candidate decides to wade the murky waters to get a job at this company, their offer will be so laughably low they’ll turn it down. How can you seriously offer a software engineer who’s living in California $100k a year (or less) with a straight face?
Human Resources are non-existent. That part of the company was so bad they had to hire engineers to do their job for them, called “Engineering and Technology.” That means instead of one manager or project leader, you have at minimum two, program and E&T. What exactly does E&T do? Even they can’t answer that question. And yes, that means there are more chiefs than worker-bees.
Good teams get asked to do many different tasks and then get overloaded. Rather than hire more high quality engineers by paying competitive compensation, multiple VPs will peg one good team of engineers to do their projects.
Ultimately there is too much business that can’t be supported by the small amount of high quality engineers the company possesses. LM (aero specifically) would do good to lose some business so the dead apples can be shaken from the tree.
