RTX reviews

Way, way too much PC posturing. Every copier station has dozens of flyer's extolling the benefits of diversity. We even have a corporate office of diversity. Now NOBODY can exactly define what they mean by diversity, but we have it and lots of it. We even have gotten to the point we will make a guy type insult but quickly add some offense removing verbiage at the end because of the fear of PC: "hey Sam, your code looks really gay...not that there is anything wrong with that of course" The continual training is a real drag. We get yearly, monthy, bi-monthly and sometimes weekly emails from corporate, the department, the project etc to take this online training course or that online training course. We are required to take 20 hours of continuing education courses per year but most are total BS. Stuff you took back in college and are a waste of time. Plus you MUST take them on your time and not the corporations time. We also have security training lumped in there. That is a TOTAL waste of time. One must sit through 40 minute flash presentations where we must actively push buttons for definitions, " did you know" tidbits and other trivial-drivel. Really poorly done unless they were designed to piss us off and waste our time (not the corporations though). At the end, we must pass an interactive test with a 70% (some tests require can require 100% but you get 3 tries) in order to pass this year's test. Of course, most of the "cool employees" just open a internet browser window and read the news while they continually hit "return" until the 40 minute flash presentation is over. Then they use common sense to pass the final and pass the course. Really poorly done. Competitors to RMS use the human touch. The round up everyone into the auditorium and you listen to the security rep for 1 hour and you are done. No tests and no pretense. Safety walkabouts are stupid. Some departments require that you annotate safety conditions weekly (and you're graded on it): "Noticed paper on floor, called janitorial services. Discussed event with coworker Joe Smith" Gad, how gay is that? Err, not that there is anything wrong with that.... yes, we have a web-based walkabout entry form. That is just plain wrong: being graded on safety annotations. Our CEO is retiring. She makes 4-6 million per year (bonuses and so on make up 90% I've heard). I'm not sure why she warrants so much when that money should become part of the profit sharing. But the king and the gold rules I guess. Make of that what you will. Our technology is 5-10 years behind the curve. It has to because our customers want, nay demand, low risk solutions. You'll hear that a lot: "low risk." Everything must be low risk. That means old, well proven technology. For example, many of our pc's still use windows 2000 but a large majority do use XPSP2. Travel also sucks. You might be in one building (off site) but your boss decides to have a meeting at the airport site (lousy parking) and so you must lose the good spot you have at your present job. Travel 15-25 minutes to the airport site. Hunt around for 10 minutes to find a spot within walking distance to the meeting. Waste an hour in the meeting (why not a telecon?!?) travel back to your original job location and hope to find another place to park. Oh, yeah, we have lots of meetings. Too many meetings I think. You have to write your own yearly evaluation. Sounds fun right? No, your boss takes your words and if he likes you, he keeps them. If he doesn't he will cut out most of your "accomplishments". I've only had that happen once. I got the message real fast: kiss up to the boss, laugh at his jokes, make sure you dress like him etc. Now I get above average reviews each year. Everything you will/must have a charge number associated with it. No charge number, no work authorized. I've had departments retroactively cancel charge numbers. It is then incumbent upon you (in my case me) to go back into the timecard history system and change the charge number to something else and HOPE the new charges on a different number don't raise a flag with the holder of that number. I hope you like Lotus Notes. It is the standard email communication platform for the company. I hate it myself. You are required to shut down your pc each night. That way you are required to restart it each morning. The bootup process really does take around 8 minutes. Plus many machines now have pgp encryption on them with really slows them down. But that is our corporate security department making us all safe and secure.

Even though your job is secure within Raytheon, its not within your project, so if you project runs out of funding you won't lose your job but you'll get placed in a position you won't necessarily like. Engineers do not get non-engineering degrees paid for(ie MBA.) People seem to use Raytheon as a stepping stone and the attrition rate amongst 2-5 year employees is very high. There is a major gap between age groups because of this. Also, because people are hired simply to fill roles on projects, there are often very over qualified people working low level jobs (although they have fair compensation) so they tend to get bored quickly. Also, yearly raises are rare to be higher than inflation.