BAE Systems Technology Solutions Reviews

Pros

BAE offers lots of opportunity for great training including as much free on-line training as you want to take. The management team is very competent and good at communicating to employees and soliciting feedback for improvements with annual employee surveys.

Cons

The leave policy isn't the most generous. They offer 3 weeks of PTO and only after 5 years do you get an additional week.

Advice to Senior Management

The assignment panel wasn't helpful to me or the other employees in my group that were notified of lay off.

Pros

Work hours were conducive to people with challenging home/work schedules. The good employees were helpful and determined to make the business a success.

Cons

Too many undeserving promotions, lack of leadership to make necessary changes regarding resources/personnel (including keeping under performers and not rewarding performers enough)

Advice to Senior Management

Make the personnel changes required to make the business a success. Too much "dead weight" is destroying customer relationship with BAE.

Pros

Strong, multinational company - good opportunities for those who wanted

Cons

Top down centric; leadership was not always communicative

Advice to Senior Management

Better communication

Pros

The Company provides good compensation and benefits.

Cons

The company has lost vision of what's important.

Pros

Good compensation, reasonable hours; knowledgeable coworkers; competent, caring, knowledgeable middle management. Middle management fought for imployees interests and called bad situations as they saw them.

Cons

Upper management was disconnected from the actual mission at hand because they were too preoccupied with the bottom line so much that quality of work suffered. Upper management conducted a bloodbath of a random layoff by email in which no one knew why they were let go.

Advice to Senior Management

Good job middle management; you really know your stuff and your efforts are appreciated. Upper management; get a clue, be aware of how your decisions directly and indirectly affect your employees and the extra burden placed on middle management to make sense of your decisions.

Pros

- The benefits are great, Health, $5250 for tuition reimbursement, Dental, matching 401k up to 6% of your salary
- Workforce is very friendly
- Many people have been there >5 -10 years
- New building is very nice

Cons

- Do not invest enough in training supervisors to perform job
- Winning lots of new proposals but struggles very hard to execute
- Front line supervisor for matrix organization serving internal customers is very stressful because Software Development is considered lowest priority, spend everyday begging for work and funding from internal upper customers.

Advice to Senior Management

Please come up with a structure that funds Supervisors and matrix organization out of overhead so they can really serve the organization well and develop good processes and procedures. Upper management in Charleston really needs to come out of there offices and engage with employees more to identify issues and serve their employees well. I believe they want to but they are under constant demands to support proposal efforts to win new contracts (which they do very well I might add). I believe that they are on to something by changing the culture to an engineering organization, investing in development of tools and processes. I believe the organization needs to sacrifice and and invest in providing training, workshops, and certifications for software developers, multimedia and training specialists, drafters, and mechanical engineers to be competitive and above the rest. It should be required of these groups every year.

Pros

BAE payed their employees more than other companies on the same contract. Good for employees but BAE was a sub-contractor and this led to problems with employee jealousy for the prime contractor. Never had to worry about time cards or had any problems with expense reimbursements or travel.

Cons

BAE was not awarded the contract, Company does not make a great effort to help you find employement within when deployment is over. There does not seem to be a lot of incentive for hiring within.

Advice to Senior Management

Win more contracts.

Pros

Compensation seems good with reasonable annual increases. Benefits seem about average for large-scale government contractors. In my experience, work demands have never been unreasonable.

Cons

While the workload doesn't seem overly-taxing for most people, this is not a place where you're likely to find a lot of professional growth. From what I saw, management seeks out service contracts where they help clients maintain status quo, rather than asserting any technical leadership. When it's time to innovate, clients seem to look elsewhere.

The company is huge and different organizations and the different projects they are working on are very isolated from one another. So, opportunities to move between organizations to find new challenges are probably limited.

Advice to Senior Management

Having people make up their own career and development goals might work in other environments. But in my experience, this is a meaningless exercise when management is not communicating any long-term direction, whether company-driven or client-driven. Personal goals need to be tied to organizational goals.

Pros

Great benefits, people are very friendly, great work/life balance, management is very understanding of time off, good amount of vacation

Cons

Management doesn't always seem to be very involved, working with the government can feel very tedious, and raises are low

Advice to Senior Management

I think management needs to spend more time communicating with people. I also believe management needs to be more involved; I often times don't see upper management for days at a time.

Pros

I had a great boss there that really cared about your personal well being. They definitely took care of their employees.

Cons

Because of the very large size of the company you can feel as though you get lost in it at times.

Advice to Senior Management

Continue to do a good job of listening to your employees, especially the ones embedded with the customers you support.