Vantaggi
Raytheon has been a solid and stable employer for me in the better part of the this decade. They have been generous with "signing" bonuses and relocation support as I changed cities. The annual performance sharing is a great benefit and paid time off and year end holidays nicely complement the financial rewards. Despite the economic downturn management has been able to find their engineers work to avoid layoffs during the slow periods.
Svantaggi
If you are interested in personal growth and good communication with coworkers, Raytheon is frustrating place to work. People can stay in their labor grade and on a given project for a long time without many opportunities for advancement. Management assigns you somewhat randomly to a project and then you become an "expert" in that area making advancement or a change difficult. I have yet to work on a project based on interests or based on where I want to be. In my experience people don't really work as a team, but rather a collection of individuals under the same task lead. As a result technical information is rarely shared across a team as whole. We have no substantive code reviews or design meetings to speak of. New engineers begin work on a project without any training and they immediately contribute, but that can translate in a lot of rework and late nights (uncompensated overtime) as the project stumbles along through development and delivery without much oversight or mentoring for the junior folks. Ironically more senior management is very process driven, but the process is centered around the business needs and appearances rather than the real technical and people issues. Some processes run by less senior project members seem more control than value oriented and few people may be able to explain why something is done the way it is.