Good place to work, with frequent minor frustrations
Pros
Good pay and benefits; work-life balance highly valued among senior management; mostly interesting and challenging work supporting the broader mission of the Navy. Excellent team of coworkers in my division. Teamwork highly valued, and many opportunities to interact/work with personnel from elsewhere in Navy/DoD and other federal and local agencies.
Cons
As in most large agencies, things fall through the cracks easily and senior management is not able to pay attention to small details. During my time at NAVFAC, I have gone several weeks without a permanent desk due to lack of space, have had a promotion processed a month later than it should have been because no one was paying attention, and found out a coworker was making significantly more than me simply because HR was sloppy and entered information incorrectly into the computer. Other coworkers have experienced similar problems. While these issues are small on their own, they do add up and can make employees feel as if they are not valued. Other daily frustrations include highly outdated techology and software and an overall difficult process to obtain the resources needed to perform one's job. I waited almost 6 months to have needed (and otherwise widely-used) software installed on my computer simply because it was not on the IT provider's "approved" list. Finally, as others have mentioned, there is definitely a resistance to change or doing something that hasn't been done before. Even when senior management is on board with something, they are often shut down by their supervisors. This seems to be a problem DoD-wide.
