Vantaggi
Raytheon has great benefits, awesome cafeteria, extensive fitness center and beautiful buildings. The employees are generally nice if you find the right clique, otherwise, not so much. Because they are a military contractor, there is an almost overwhelming emphasis on ethical behavior, as if those of us already with ethics need this continually pounded into our brains. As with any professional engineering organization, there is a reasonable level of work hour flexibility.
Svantaggi
If you have any rough edges, you will most certainly NOT fit into this company. They WILL round off any of that over time. They also use people, and when they're done with you, it's layoff time. Projects come and go, and so do vast numbers of people. There is no chance to move around the company because of entrenched special interests and the 'need to know'. In the defense industry, because of the classified nature of things, this is called the Silo Effect. When people feel threatened by any attempt to learn from them, you're completely shut out from any further knowledge acquisition. Many long-term employees are so damn busy, they have no time, nor inclination, to share their special unwritten undocumented knowledge, especially if they feel threatened in any way by your ability to understand their 'special knowledge'. Working in the top secret/classified environment is so chaotic and dynamic that most people in the same group have cubes no where near each other (many times on different floors!), making collaborative work virtually impossible. And they wonder why projects are perpetually and disastrously late. If you work in a secret/classified area, no cellphones, etc. at your desk and limited outside internet access. Project Managers are required to do actual detailed engineering in addition to their managerial tasks, thus causing poor results for both. Documentation is touted as being exceedingly important. However, the reality is that it's disjoint, difficult to find, of exceedingly poor quality, and almost never kept up-to-date. And don't bother using their intranet 'search' to find any corporate documentation of any value because they subscribe to the 'search everything' philosophy regardless of where it's stored, how long it's been on the servers, or its relevance to real employees. Press releases are considered just as important to the search engine as human resource policies, making the search results utterly useless. The company tries to get people 'involved' with things (blogs, discussion forums, etc.) that have absolutely nothing to do with the work at hand. This is a gigantic waste of time and resources. Do not fall for this because your work will suffer while you gain nothing from these interactions with other employees. There are special 'innovators' who present what they believe to be state-of-the-art managerial innovations that turn out to be processes and organizational structures that smaller companies have been using FOR DECADES! And they're so very proud of themselves for 'discovering' them. I had to open a few windows to let the massive bloviation out. This is another company that continues to drink the Six Sigma cool aid. This failed management tool has been debunked for more than two decades, and yet they're still riding that broken horse into the sunset. There are literally hundreds of Six Sigma Masters (or some such ego-driven moniker) who tout their ability to "drive innovation" throughout the company. My experience with these people was that they had their collective heads so far up their rears, that they truly thought they were seeing daylight! Astonishing how deluded they were concerning their actual ability to accomplish real work. But the company continues to push this useless and overblown management tool, tying promotions to the employees' continual movement up the Six Sigma ladder. Astonishingly microscopic cubicles. Too much noise to effectively concentrate on my work. Most people use their 'outside voice' for indoor personal conversations. This is a direct failure of managers to create an atmosphere of respect for fellow employees. These conversations should be moved to designated meeting rooms so the rest of us can concentrate on the difficult and detailed work at hand. There are two different groups of IT staff, normal and classified. Both of them treat their 'customers' like crap because they're outsourced! Many companies are doing this to the great detriment of their actual employees because the outsourced people have no connection to the company and it's employees whom they serve.