Boeing Configuration Design Engineer reviews

Management was virtually non-existent above site manager. They only showed up for contract renewals and bad news. Shuffled off to a "lower cost business unit to stay competitive" means that you can't use company HR site for healthcare and benefits actions. No way to promote while staying on site. Clearly geared toward hiring military retirees. Intentionally misclassified as Mission Planner/Support rather than IT for contract reasons. Turns I was not in the appropriate salary band and incorrect classification made it very difficult to transfer within the company.

This is not a company for "free thinker" engineers. The engineering side is run by "subject matter experts" who are 20 years behind in their field. When challenged, they respond with something along the lines of "we already have the best in class capabilities, why do we need to change?". Job status has no basis in merit: it is purely based on how long you have been at the company (which explains why some really unqualified people are considered experts). Whenever people poke their heads out of the box, they get pushed back down. They actively hunt down & destroy disruptive innovation, despite claiming "innovation" is a company value. Design is largely done by intuition and experience of the experts, which usually leads to poor performing designs and cost over-runs. The design mentality is largely the same as it was in the late 1980's, but with incremental technology improvements. Also, there is the bureaucracy. It took a full year to get approval to bring in non-standard computers for a group that needed better computers. Any time someone tries to do something new/non-standard, it has to go through a massive approval process, which inevitably ends up getting an expert to say "well, we don't need that, we already have the best", despite whatever evidence you show to the contrary. And, since they're the experts, their word is god.