With the independence there are a lot of workers that do take advantage of the system. Boeing has sent a clear message that they don't care about their IT / Software Development skills or retaining talent with their rampant layoffs of the IT organization. The culture believes their competitive advantage is within improving "the process" not in the system architecture that runs "the process". Buying vendor commercial software and customizing it fit the companies needs is ingrained into the culture, even though the last couple decades have proved that is not a viable solution for their "superior" manufacturing process.
Raises are nearly impossible to achieve on good merit. Advancement is pretty formulaic by the numbers of years at the company, even then it is no guarantee. It is common place for an easily justified upgrade to be postponed for years due to money mismanagement and their convoluted system of skill code pools and money allotment. Also, pay is abysmally low for software dev skills, as an employee with 1-5 years. However, management will always claim they are competitive if you look at the full package. This is a lie, there is no competition other tech companies are at least 30-50% more base pay with similar benefits. I would be cautious about accepting a software / IT job at Boeing, their current strategy is to "layoff" all expensive employees with this skill set and hire cheaper inexperienced labor in South Carolina. I suspect the company has about 3-4 years left of this cycle before the IT infrastructure will completely collapse. At that point the company will start to change its ways and bring more things in house while claiming a "cost savings".
