DRS Technologies Reviews

Pros

Pay is good and Benefits are good as well .Time off seeems to be more of a focus and acceptance in this company verses others where you would have very little of either.

Cons

Upper Management seems to be living in Lala land when it comes to the reality of the average employee.

Advice to Senior Management

Please be honest with your employees about lengths of contract and if the contract is going to do well or if it is going to fail.

Pros

The pay is some of the best that I have seen among the companies that I have worked for while a civilian contractor.

Cons

Hostile work environment caused by management favoring certain employees due to the "Good Old Boys Club" environment. Constantly hearing negative and hostile comments about fellow employees and management.

Advice to Senior Management

Take a more proactive approach to your employees, Share information in a timely, efficient manner. Don't allow employees to hear about changes second hand. Recognize employees who go above and beyond.

Pros

Awesome supervisor and I could not ask for anyone better! Great pay, holiday scheduling, and ease of understanding to personal issues or personal time needed.

Cons

The only bad thing which is not limited to DRS but all contracting obligations is the fact that contracts are not guaranteed and sometimes budgets are cut but that comes with the territory

Advice to Senior Management

Keep up the great work. I would love to work with DRS again in the future and I will always recommend DRS to other people.

Pros

Good benifits and good money compaired to the industry

Cons

very political, and if you do not belong to the "Good Boys" group, it is very difficult and very frustrating

Advice to Senior Management

Clean house of some of the senior managment. They make very poor decisions and cost you ALOT of money. I doubt you guys even know about it

Pros

Challenging work

Good upper management guidance

Cons

Bad Program Management
A lot of expected overtime

Advice to Senior Management

Do a better job at recognizing and rewarding the successes of your teams

Pros

Job or location flexibility
Flextime
(some) work clothes provided

Cons

Pay
lack of opportunities to advance
incompetence of senor managers and business development

Advice to Senior Management

Engage your co-op employees more so their time spent their is more meaningful. Co-op employees should not be regulated to menial task only and not participate in the everyday challenges of their chosen career. Assign mentors that will further that career growth.

Pros

Overal a good place to work, until you are older or management changes.

Cons

The loyalty to older employees is somewhat lacking.
A youth oriented culture the last few years.
There are not always provisions for educational benefits for non-exempt employees. Even though it is a benefit.

Pros

DRS Technologies has some very good core technologies.
They have been beneficiaries of supplemental war funding since 2005 which has enabled growth.
Some very good talent in the company, but those who do not leave or are layed-off tend to be sheep or political manipulators.

Cons

Management style is very inner circle.
Executive management is uncommunicative and uncollaborative.
Reorganizations and layoffs are an annual event, so the culture is one of fear. Management changes constantly.
Very little if any healthy risk-taking, largely because employees cannot expect management support.
Annual reorgs and layoffs are a diversion from the real problem--lack of management vision and guts.
Many of the best people--those who know the answers but management is too egotistical to collaborate with--have either left the company or been layed-off.
A sad state of affairs.

Advice to Senior Management

Advise to DRS Corporate management--or better yet, the Finmeccanica board of directors--is to bring in a quality management consulting firm to triage the leadership situation and the effects on the staff, and follow their advise for fixing it.

Pros

the pay was decent and many of the individuals working are very well educated and helpful. The education reimbursement plan was spectacular and in-house education was outstanding if you were allowed to take part in it.

Cons

My first couple of years with DRS were quite enjoyable but the last year there was a severe decline in job satisfactory. All of this due to mid-management changes, people who were are not management material due to their inability to deal with everyone on a fair basis and a ambivilance to quality of product. Individuals who had no training in management were giving supervisors positions on the production floor and used initimdation tactics with employees to do all the biddings of the supervisors including ignoring manufacturing instructions and denying they gave the individuals such an order getting the employee a write up. This done with the managers knowledge and permission. Many employees are afraid of losing their jobs at the whim of the supervisors and manager. The supervisors continue to destroy the program budget with every weekend overtime and no one building product during the week.

Advice to Senior Management

Senior management needs to start paying closer attention to the behavior and attitudes of mid management and supervisors on the floor dealing directly with production floor staff. Their is a great deal of fear and dissatisfaction there and I don't believe senior management wishes for the employees who build product to be treated in such a manner since it reflects in product quality which is sent to our soldiers in the battlefield. I believe this company has grown so fast it has forgotten what the point was, a quality company who treats their employees like they would wish their daughters to be treated and produce a top quality product to help keep our warrior abroad out of harms way. The key word is quality since our soldiers lives depend on it and that is currently not the case.

Pros

The pay is decent and the engineers are extremely knowledgeable.

Cons

Uninteresting work, Slow to change