Northrop Grumman – “Lots of Overtime”

Pros

Good company for someone who is good at following orders and who knows how to not cave into the pressure of working overtime.

Cons

You will work a lot of overtime as a software engineer. It is considered your duty. Unfortunately the company has a habit of trying to get their workforce to make up "non-productive" time such as going to the bathroom, going to "lunch meetings", traveling on company business, and anything else that doesn't directly help their bottom line. There is a "workforce initiative" which is supposed to mitigate some of the tension related to things like this, but ultimately they do not encourage their work force to use the correct charge numbers for these tasks. For example, one of their tactics is: your manager will tell you that you get paid for overtime, then (at near future date) reveal that you are not authorized to charge overtime and proceed to tell you X amount of work needs to be completed "or else." For the particular project I am working on (the postal office's flats sorting project), I had a manager once admit candidly to me that they were told explicitly to use an "very aggressive software schedule". In once instance, after telling a manager it would take 8 days for me to complete something, they told me that I have to do it in 4 and that charging overtime was not allowed. From talking to other coworkers and my direct bosses openly about the problem, I have gathered that the overtime problem ultimately stems from upper level management (this is good in the sense that the manager directly above you is more often or not "on your side", but bad in the sense that the overtime problems are widespread amongst software engineers).

Advice to Senior Management

Listen to your employees when they tell you that your not giving them enough time to get the required tasks done.