Raytheon Reviews

Pros

Work-life balance
Many locations
Engineers are nice to work with

Cons

Lots of bureaucracy and process

Pros

Strong company, driven to succeed and train employees to be successful.

Cons

New employees have a difficult time establishing themselves in an environment of other long-time Raytheon employees

Advice to Senior Management

Rely less on "legacy" employee leadership, drive change through teams from bottom up

Pros

* Work/Life balance is respected. Most people do around 40 hours. Overtime is paid.
* Company shutdown over Christmas to New Years.

Cons

* Review process is not transparent.
* About 70% of people get a 'meets expectations'
* Can get stuck working older technologies, like Ada, that aren't marketable elsewhere

Advice to Senior Management

There seems to be few carrots and sticks in place for professional advancement. That is, it's not widely known which activities are rewarded and those that are punished. Since nobody knows what people got promoted for (or why one got passed over), it's difficult to gage what's truly valued.

Pros

A company who treated you like family.

Cons

Long Hours. Stressful. Plant shutdown and put many out of work.

Pros

Management frequently recognizes good and hard work with praise and giftcards.
Management does not interfere with employee's planned time off, even when it is inconvenient for the project.
Management always treats the employee with respect.
Management encourages employees to ask for help early if it was needed.
Co-workers eagerly share knowledge, finding time to lend expertise.
Raytheon encourages its worker to work the 9/80 schedule, giving the employee every other Friday off.
Raytheon closes the week between Christmas and New Years day, adding up to days off with pay without using Paid Time Off.
Raytheon has great benefits

Cons

Raytheon should provide training for estimating "Lines of Code" for software bids. When the estimation is performed poorly, the company can be faced with an impossible schedule or failure to get the contract due to over-estimated effort.

Pros

Raytheon is committed to providing the highest quality products to our customers. Raytheon has an inclusive and respectful environment. Raytheon offers extremely competitive compensation packages.

Cons

Raytheon is a very process driven company which can sometimes limit innovation and out of the box thinking. That said however, it is possible to tailor processes with appropriate levels of approval. Raytheon is a matrixed organization that is functional driven, which can sometimes cause tension supporting programs in terms of conflicting priorities, goals, and process. All that said however, with strong program leadership, this all can be overcome.

Pros

-Generally a secure job environment
-Work life balance is very agreeable
-Assuming you have a boss who will fight for you and you perform well, labor grade promotions will come (2-4yrs at each grade)
-Winning new business generally results in increased visibility, recognition, and increasingly more responsibility
-Sometimes very easy to stand out, since most employees are mediocre, task driven workers. The work is designed, produced, sold, and managed by a smaller group of very intelligent/experienced people.
-There are good mentors and coaches in the company...but its up to you to network and find them (no different from any other large corp)
-Company does a good job in tactical execution and "fire fighting"
-Aging workforce will create many openings for vertical movement in 5-10yrs

Cons

-401k and medical is decent but slowly moving in the wrong direction, especially for new hires
-Can become highly political depending on what program or function you work in...middle management (E/A5-7) is generally only moderately political...Anything above level 8 labor grade politics becoming increasingly more prevalent and can become cut throat and very territorial sometimes. Sends the wrong message to subordinates (ie political skills are just as valuable as competence in order to earn a leadership position).
-Very siloed (sometimes by design) and sometimes "clicky"
-Very financially conservative...tolerance for risk is very, very low
-Flawless execution is "just expected"...emphasis is now more growth focused, but the company still doesn't know how be a industry leader when it comes to marketing, capture, and gov't relations
-Pay grade increase does not equate to large pay increases...expect 2-4% annual increases and 4-8% increases when getting a pay grade move. The best way to make a large >15% increase is to leave the business unit you work for (or the company all together) and come back a few years later.
-Most employees do not understand the strategic mapping of the market, the strategic direction of the corp, and how it relates to their function/program.

Advice to Senior Management

-Do not bring a hammer down when a subordinate has a dissenting opinion if it is brought up in the right forum and in the right manner. Its healthy to have disagreement from time to time
-Take some risk on for once...company funded initiatives will need to become more prevalent as the RDT&E and procurement budgets at DoD get slashed.
-Reduce the time it takes to for the company to make an acquisition
-If international business is the market we are going after, we will need to start placing qualified people on global assignments more frequently
-You did a good job hiring young technical talent...now its time to develop them. Still a lot of room for improvement on hiring young business talent though.

Pros

Great salary, decent holiday schedule, very flexible work hours (within customer core hours), the health and retirement benefits were good.

Cons

Like many places, the notion that training is an essential employee benefit is all talk. I worked there for three and a half years and only saw training as part of my severance package. Really? The excuse was always "no budget". The review process is a joke as well. Raytheon's process does not translate well to the wholly owned subsidiaries they've acquired. As such, the first line management has no clue on how to make it work other then cutting/pasting a vanilla set of requirements that their team must complete. Oh, and training is a key issue in the "employee development" section. Rhetorically, how can one check off the training goals if the employee isn't allowed the budget to attend the training?

Moving within the company is all talk as well. While I made several efforts to transfer within my last couple of weeks, there was no true effort by HR to place me in a new slot. Now that I've been laid off I've been contacted twice by Raytheon recruiters. In both situations the recruiters had no idea I was recently laid off. Really? Did you actually look at the posted online resume? Come on...

As for my first line management...I saw him at the customer site four times at the most over a year or so time period and even then he only came in to the building twice (otherwise I had to meet him in the parking lot). I'm not sure how one can develop customer relationships with that type of effort. When he gave me the news that my days were numbered he promised to write me a letter of recommendation. Two months later I wrote one for him to just sign. No muss, no fuss, right? He wouldn't do it and I'm still waiting (not really).

Advice to Senior Management

Get a new job. If you're a technical person, remain a technical person. Don't try to be something (management) you aren't qualified to be. As for leadership...they're so far into the stratosphere they have no idea what goes on below them.

Pros

Relaxed atmosphere and low level of accountability

Cons

Restrictive imagination implementation and old style thinking

Advice to Senior Management

Get rid of driftwood

Pros

Working for Raytheon will expose you to a number of competent and experienced individuals. There is a lot to be learned from the older peers as long as you can find the right programs to work on where you can interact with these people.

Cons

The management team tends to be very disconnected from the people who they lead, often making decisions that run counter to the information they are given. The ability for younger engineers to advance and develop is hindered by the lack of focus by management on the topic.