Lockheed Martin Reviews in Washington, DC Area

Current Employee – been working at Lockheed Martin full-time for more than 7 years

Pros – There is a real disposition to work/life balance. Flexible hours are the norm. That said, if you get the wrong management crew you might be under pressure to work long weeks - but at flexible times. It certainly is of value when raising a family.

Salary is good. Company is becoming extremely cheap ("the new reality"!) but they do keep promises. And they make a strong effort not to lay people off.

There is an encouragement towards diversity of workforce and diversity of thought. Managers are generally well-trained and have good perspective beyond the crises of the day.

Cons – There is not a particular bent towards software development. It shows. You need to go through layers of process to as much as download a free IDE onto your PC. We're frequently the opposite of tech savvy (not sure if there is a term). A mania towards security, combined with layers of beauracracy on purchasing or even downloading software tools, does discourage innovation.

The company is full of older workers desperately trying to hang on - and do any job - long enough for their pension to kick in. Major topics of conversation ere are early retirements and whether individuals will survive long enough to get their pensions - not solving problems and creating things.

There is not an effective base for software management where I work. I've seen high-profile efforts run badly by "manager"s who have no real life experience, and who flounder and cause chaos. This company knows how to build many things, but not so much software.

Advice to Senior Management – I've got to think that if you had an environment that lent itself more to rapid software development and associated innovation, that it would pay off. You should worry less about process and more about giving people room to create.

You should be embracing the "Agile" software development model to a greater extent. But you can't, because you've got a culture full of beauraucrats who can't coexist with it. So you ossify, day by day.

Not atypically for a defense contractor, you sometimes reward people for telling you what you want to hear, and for pretending to work hard by always being in the office. There's value in the contrary opinions, and value in working smart. I've seen people promoted well out of their depth by virtue of long hours and ingratiation; they're time bombs waiting to go off.

Yes, I would recommend this company to a friend – I'm not optimistic about the outlook for this company

Current Employee – been working at Lockheed Martin full-time for more than a year

Pros – Many unique projects, not impossibly hard to move across the corporation

Cons – Pay will never be close enough to what other companies will offer

Advice to Senior Management – Early career folks such as myself are leaving by the truckload, you know it, and you know why, there's not enough leadership opportunities, performance assessments are a joke and merit increases seem to eternally suck. The only way to grow a decent salary is to leave the company and come back with an offer, or be a TA to some director/VP (essentially be someone's pet).

Yes, I would recommend this company to a friend

Current Employee – been working at Lockheed Martin full-time for more than a year

Pros – - Corporate experience
- Learn how projects are managed
- If you're the type of person that just cares about money and getting your workday out of the way as quickly as possible and going home, then you'll like it here, and won't mind the cons below.
- Free access to Books24x7 and Safari books Online

Cons – I came to Lockheed directly from college with a degree in computer science. I've been with the company for about a year, and here is my experience:

1) For a great majority of my time here, I had absolutely nothing to do. That's right, I'm being paid to just sit in my office and "wait" for some someone to assign some work. There were a number of people just like me, just wandering around the halls, hanging out in the labs with nothing to do. To make matters worse, they would still hire more people into the program to fill vacant positions, which makes no sense.

2) When I did have work, it usually involved trivial things like updating documentation, updating some records in a database, etc. At first I thought this was just overhead for some bigger project that the team I was on was working on. As it turned out, my whole team's job was to simple manage some word documents and keep them updated, and do other vary trivial tasks. This was all, like a slap in the face to me coming from a computer science background and having actually solved real world problems. The worst part is that most of the people on my team carried the title of "Software Engineer". In fact, my manager's title was "Senior Software Engineering Mngr", but I doubt they knew anything about software (Other than using Microsoft Office).

3) There is subtle slogan around the company "Selling yesterday's technologies at tomorrow prices". That is so right, and accurately describes Lockheed (at least IS&GS).

4) Since I started, people have been leaving the company on a regular basis. Most of the new hires that I started with lasted a few months and then quit, mainly for the same reasons listed above.

5) The most useful skill that I was able to apply to my job in my time here was my Microsoft Office skills. If I knew that I would be doing this, I would not have gone to one of the best engineering schools in the country, I would have gone to Devry instead.

Advice to Senior Management – We give you resumes for a reason, and expect for you the leverage our skills. Since I've been with the company, I've honestly felt that my IQ has dropped a little bit due to the lack of critical thinking that my job required. I've spent hours after work taking advantage of the free online books that Lockheed provided, studying new technologies, languages, and challenged myself outside of my "software engineering" job with side projects that actually requires a software engineering mindset, because Lockheed fails to do so.

No, I would not recommend this company to a friend – I'm not optimistic about the outlook for this company

Former Employee – worked at Lockheed Martin full-time for more than 3 years

Pros – If you are "one of the boys" you should do well.
You get to work on pretty neat things.
Salaries are OK, not super competitive--you are compared to your peers within your rank, most times this works out OK.

Cons – You will be passed over for promotion if you are not one of the "good old boys".
There are lots of actively operating quid pro quo relationships.
People are rewarded for kissing up and personal relationships.
They do not have a reliable HR that cares about what is reported to them--they often turn the other cheek.
Mid-level management runs that place, regardless of what the upper level management thinks or what their mission statements are.
Mid-level management routinely encourages unethical practices, esp wrt charging time to government contracts.

Advice to Senior Management – Wake up and realize what is happening to your organization.
Give HR the power to actually make effective changes and remove high-profile people that are actively engaging in unethical behavior.
Listen to the people that have the courage to come forward with questions and concerns.

No, I would not recommend this company to a friend – I'm not optimistic about the outlook for this company

Current Employee – been working at Lockheed Martin full-time for more than 10 years

Pros – Fantastic and intelligent people
Workforce development if you're in the right pipeline
Cutting edge tech

Cons – If not in the right development pipeline, you can be those"lifers"
Health benefits have gone from average to poor. One health plan available and you end playing quite a bit for it for so-so to poor coverage.
Salary is the bottom as far as defense contractors go. From a friend, "You won't get rich working here but you won't be poor either"
 Promotions are hard to come by.

Advice to Senior Management – Take a look compensation packages. They seem to get worse every year.

Yes, I would recommend this company to a friend – I'm not optimistic about the outlook for this company

Former Employee – worked at Lockheed Martin full-time for more than a year

Pros – Lockheed Martin is a great place for recent graduates to start their careers and prove themselves. From that respect, they are actually pretty good at providing opportunities for people where other companies might want to see more experience. Their sheer size also provides a lot of breadth as far as opportunities to work with different government agencies/customers, various technologies and geographic locations.

Cons – Not so great if you're looking to grow your career (especially with regard to salary growth). Lockheed Martin is known in the defense contractor space for under-compensating employees. You would think this means cost savings for the government, but in reality most contractors charge about the same, meaning Lockheed is just skimming more off the top for themselves (and to pay upper and middle management cushy salaries.) You're better off finding a smaller company, with smaller overhead that can afford to pay you a better salary. Also, it's a crapshoot when it comes to the "work/life balance" they advertise. I worked on a program where you were expected to put in 60-70 hour weeks (5 hours of which you worked for free), but I also worked an IRAD which was a typical 40 hour week. Corporate culture is standard big company culture. The shareholder is number 1. They will do everything they can to maximize their revenue (how much they charge for you to the government) and minimize their cost (how much you get in salary, how many days off, fringe benefits, etc.) The system is set up to reward the top management more money and stocks to treat their regular employees poorly and convince them to stay for as long as possible.

Advice to Senior Management – "Market" surveys of salaries are deceptive statistics. If you continue to use these as an excuse to under-compensate employees, the good ones leave and you're stuck holding the bag with the non-performers. This of course leads to unhappy customers, inability to execute on contracts and (eventual) loss of future contracts and revenue.

No, I would not recommend this company to a friend – I'm not optimistic about the outlook for this company

Former Employee – worked at Lockheed Martin full-time for more than 10 years

Pros – Benefits
Telecommuting if manager feels comfortable with it
Work/Life balance with flex time options

Cons – Have less personnel to do the work since many layoffs happen
Too many managers and not enough workers
Not fair treatment to all

Advice to Senior Management – Take notice of who is really doing the work and make sure they get the kudos and incentives. Not just who give good lip service.

No, I would not recommend this company to a friend – I'm not optimistic about the outlook for this company

Former Employee – worked at Lockheed Martin as an intern for more than 7 years

Pros – NIce employees and work environment

Cons – To large of a company to properly manage each department efficiently

Yes, I would recommend this company to a friend

Current Employee – been working at Lockheed Martin full-time for more than 7 years

Pros – A lot of experience gained from my time with LM

Cons – Poor salary
Poor Senior managers support
No opportunity to advice unless you play politics well

Advice to Senior Management – Focus more on your people

No, I would not recommend this company to a friend – I'm not optimistic about the outlook for this company

Current Employee – been working at Lockheed Martin full-time for more than 8 years

Pros – Solid employment (near recession-proof), strong corporate leadership, several internal courses and skills improvement seminars available.

Cons – Lockheed is a giant freight train, not easily altered from the course. Change can be incremental, slow, frustrating, and inconsistent. Not surprising, considering it's a company of ~120k+ employees from several disparate legacy and heritage locations.

Advice to Senior Management – Make sure to promote from within when possible, and be willing to further integrate into "one company, one team".

Yes, I would recommend this company to a friend – I'm optimistic about the outlook for this company