Boeing Reviews in Los Angeles, CA Area

Pros

The only pro for working for Boeing are the benefits and perks. It's hard to beat their educational reimbursement program. Great thing to take advantage of.

Cons

Most of the meaningful engineering work is given to suppliers. This leaves little room for development of younger employees. Also, no big contracts looming in the near future. Also, there is a big disconnect between senior management and the actual engineering workforce. It seems as if they don't understand the nature of the work we're doing always leads to problems down the road. Additionally, performance reviews are a complete waste of time as nearly all employees (stellar and mediocre) get very similar reviews and performance increases.

Advice to Senior Management

You guys are hopeless

Pros

Benefits and Multiple Sites to work at.

Cons

Big company mentality, bureaucratic, promotions into senior leadership not solely based on merit

Advice to Senior Management

More work needs to be done to make Boeing a meritocracy.

Pros

They offer great benefits, and a relaxed culture. The company is diverse and there is opportunities for you if you are willing to work for them and aggressively pursue them.

Cons

As a large company, the pace feels slow at times. People are afraid to do things new and different. If you don't take a lot of initiative for your own career, it will be easy to stagnate. The low level management structure is a little confusing, with each employee often having more than one "manager". A lot of time is spent on "process", but their processes seem less structured/useful than in previous jobs.

Advice to Senior Management

I don't have feedback for them. I couldn't manage this company.

Pros

Good benefits, Good work life and a good company to work for in general. A very structured ranking system and have alot of old skool benefits such as pension.

Cons

Not too much to learn once you're used to it. It gets to the point where you're just clocking in and out an just taking orders like a blue collar job yet you're in a white collar field. At times it seems like there's no innovation within the team environment, as everything is very structural and process oriented. There's alot of overhead involved because of this and it can really hinder work.

Advice to Senior Management

Make your employees think of new ideas

Pros

Their benefits package. This includes great health care, industry leading educational reimbursement program, and the opportunity to work the leading edge of technology. Also, in regards to job security, lay offs are rare and mainly a thing of the past. Although they still happen and especially in the Southern California area, with an aging work force retiring very shortly, there will be many positions still available for the foreseeable future.

Cons

Promotions are based more on seniority rather than performance. Very socialistic promotion process. Very reactive rather than proactive approach in regards to HR problems. If you are a type A person who has the drive and passion to reach for higher and higher, Boeing may not be the best place for you.

Advice to Senior Management

By being reactive to the problems with retaining young talent, you will be setting yourself up for a large brain drain in the near future. However, with the industry downsizing in the Southern California area, this may not be that bad of an option.

Pros

High salary, great benefits package, educational reimbursement, etc. In terms of benefits, Boeing is second to none. They do this mainly to encourage young talent to make the transition to the Los Angeles area, when in reality, if these people looked at the housing prices and cost of living in Los Angeles, they would turn right back around.

Cons

Always in a state of flux in terms of job security. Not very interested in advancing the little guy. This is a very old culture, and there isn't much willingness to change, as a lot of these guys are just sticking it out until retirement.

Advice to Senior Management

Be more open with the little guys.

Pros

Good benefits. You generally don't have to work your butt off.

Cons

Not a lot of SW development in SoCal. What there is, isn't all that interesting.

Advice to Senior Management

Stop transferring bad employees around the company. Just get rid of them.

Pros

Boeing gives you the opportunity to work with cutting edge technologies and to contribute to high profile projects. If you are proactive and pursue the many opportunities which are available you can progress through very advance stages of a career at Boeing, both technical and non-technical.

Cons

Boeing is a large bureaucratic company with red tape everywhere. If you are the type of person who feels a need to see the direct impact of their contributions and wants to be engaged with all stages of a project's life cycle, Boeing may not be your place. A young engineer at Boeing, such as me, should expect their involvement to be narrow and focused. Additionally, a young engineer will have a lot of oversight. But this is expected, when dealing with complex systems like aircraft and spacecraft, a highly organized approach is needed.

One additionally note: in recent years Boeing has move away from the manufacturing of many of the required components. At this point they may be thought of as a large scale integrator. A lot of the old timers are bitter about the loss of Boeing’s “real” manufacturing abilities. Some have a more thoughtful outlook and consider the change to be needed as it allows Boeing to leverage the abilities of more specialized manufactures and to remain competitive on a global stage.

Advice to Senior Management

Help young employees to gain a better understanding of the company as a whole.

Pros

You have the opportunity to work on cool and important projects with great access to technology you'd never see otherwise. You can work on commercial aircraft, defense, and space systems all within the same company.

Cons

Huge bureaucracy. Promotions based on seniority rather than merit. I was kept out of a promotion because I was one year short of experience for the position, even though my daily responsibilities already matched the job description for the promotion I was pursuing.

There are a lot of bad software engineers at Boeing. I worked on a team of 16, and there were really only 3-5 competent contributors.

Advice to Senior Management

Fire your bad software engineers. Move more towards a meritocracy rather than rewarding based on seniority. Get rid of the pension for new employees and use the money to reward good employees and hire new ones.

Pros

Compensation and Benefits
Availability of jobs at other Boeing facilities
Annual share in profit, if Boeing does well during the year

Cons

Promotions given to non-degreed employees vs employees who have graduate degrees
'Good old boy network' is very much alive in this company
Lack of 'backbone' with management to deal with indecisive customer
Lack of recognition and apprecition given to employees who excel

Advice to Senior Management

Live the values preached to the employees...realize the customer is not always right and be wiling to push back. Look out for the company and prevent scope creep.