Raytheon Reviews in Dallas-Fort Worth, TX Area

Pros

Profit Sharing
Low Key Work Environment

Cons

Salary not on par with other tech companies

Pros

Great benefits, occasionally interesting work, 3% profit sharing most years, good location with minimal traffic, pay is a bit above average

Cons

Engineers don't get the tools they need, instability of work load, poor communications from management, engineering work frequently consists of doing the same thing repeatedly for years at a time. Raises and bonuses are only tied to company performance, not individual performance.

Advice to Senior Management

Get some input from engineers about the tools they need instead of having an IT org decide for them. Provide more incentive to overachieve, instead of the same raises for good and bad performance.

Pros

Good for work-life balance
internal culture of respect for individuals
proactive treatment of minorities and women
good benefits, competitive pay

Cons

Too big to manage as "one-company",
mid-level management values short-term gain over common sense and long term growth
Riged expensive processes that inhibit innovation, creativity and common sense
Clueless corporate marketing

Advice to Senior Management

Selectively eliminate layers of middle management and empower employees
Hire mid-level managers from the commercial sector (vs defense & aerospace)
Value soft skills more - especially ability to build and motivate effecctive teams
Recognize engineers are not interchangable in a job category

Pros

Excellent training in "big company" processes. Raytheon (and their legacy companies) have a lot of "lessons learned" and these lessons made their way into the processes flown down to employees.

Cons

Raytheon is a process-heavy organization. As such, some processes exist that are perceived as non-value added. Upward mobility is limited in the NCS organization.

Pros

Good benefits
Enjoy working with Govt. customers.
Engineering staff is supportive of one another (on a regional basis)
Company will pay for graduate work if you take the initiative
For me: close to family which is why I'm here

Cons

Massive amounts of management overhead -- not uncommon to have 3 to 5 management types that you have to status (sometimes everyday). Getting permission to publish an article takes 6 signatures across 3 states.
Terrible physical facilities; old buzzing lights, 40 year old cube furniture (the QA stamp on my surface says "April, 1971"), building vibrations you can see in the surface of your coffee. The situation is made worse by executive leadership constantly updating their offices. Complaints are usually met with "Well you should have seen it in 1977 when people back here smoked." It's 2011 guys, maybe we should raise the bar a bit. Note that most of the complaints here are specific to the North Texas area. CA and MA look more like the recruitment videos.
Morale is not great; again, sense is that executives are the only true employees, the rest of us are just a way to bill hours. Even little things like executive staff getting small sinks in their areas while engineers have to trek water from the bathroom for coffee brings home just how little engineering means to management.
Constant cramming of employees into ever smaller spaces reduces productivity (ever try to debug a problem across multiple parallel threads while 50 people around you are chatting?)
Caste system in engineering -- EE at top, software at bottom. If you can't solder it or take a wrench to it, executives really have no idea what you're doing. This is reflected in resource allocation. As an EE you'll get a nicer pc, nicer cube, etc. Note you'll still be treking to the bathroom to get water for coffee, so it's not all suger and spice. (spice, get it?)
No training for new employees -- you get more training as a new employee at Starbucks than you do at Raytheon. If the Govt. doesn't pay for something, it just doesn't happen. Not uncommon to have people with the company 5 to 10 years and still not understand engineering process.
Bias against the "fly over" states. Executives / leadership sit on the coasts for the most part. Not uncommon for senior staff to still be more loyal to their old (non-existent) companies than to Raytheon; e.g. there are a lot of Hughes, E-Systems, and TI-DSEG engineers, but very, very few Raytheon engineers.
A lot of the staff is RIP'd (Retired In Place). At 40-something I'm the youngest in most of my meetings. Far too many people are waiting to start their pension (the longer you stay the more you get).
The company owns every idea you produce. As one Raytheon attorney put it "if you create a new fishing lure in your garage with 3 buddies, Raytheon owns 33%". This is standard in corporate America, but still depressing.
Very little incentive to push new ideas forward, especially if they are not in Raytheon's traditional product list. Again, like most companies, Raytheon innovates through M&A.
Raytheon is not a single company, but a loose coalition of Govt. programs. Understand that above all. For engineering, your career depends on the program you're attached to.

Advice to Senior Management

Stop putting yourself first. Try walking on the ground with your troops instead of acting like gods in the clouds throwing down random thunderbolts.

Pros

Flexible schedule - 9/80 or half day Fridays
Competitive salary in comparison to similar positions
Great benefits and decent 401K matching

Cons

Very drab work environment
Very behind the times
Management has good intentions but terrible execution
If you're below the age of 35 <------ DON'T DO IT
They will call anyone a supply chain specialist just for the sake of feeling like they are utilizing supply chain standards. They're not.

Advice to Senior Management

Management is more concerned with what it looks like we're doing than what we actually do. Do some industry research on supply chain initiatives and process improvements. From personal experience it seems some very wacky decision making is going on.

Pros

You get to work with cutting edge technology and you will collaborate with folks from all departments. The work is challenging and your customers are very grateful.

Cons

Too much time goes by between promotions. In the Texas sites, there's a real "good ole boy" culture, that makes it hard to move up if you're not working with the folks that have the ability to promote you.

Advice to Senior Management

Encourage the senior managers to embrace change and punish them appropriately when they abuse their power. Mid-level managers are pushing away young talent because they have a hard time working with people who do not like authoritative management (the millenial generation).

Pros

Worklife balance, challenging work, good equipment to work on

Cons

VP of Information Solutions wants to hire only nodding heads, or people from her previous employment

Advice to Senior Management

Get rid of VPs who don't hire qualified people from within Raytheon

Pros

Raytheon builds lots of cool defense stuff, has flexible work hours, decent pay and benefits, and doesn't have big layoffs, but also hires slowly

Cons

Top heavy with older workers, makes moving up VERY slow, Raytheon uses a "Time in Grade" model, no matter how awesome you are, if you don't have enough time in grade, you won't get promoted. I am rare person in my 30's, few mid career people, younger workers leave, older workers stay on forever.

At some pay level you get big bonuses, but they make the actual policy obscure so you don't really know how much the big shots make, rumor is at level 7 the company pays for you to have a financial advisor.

Constantly beat over the head with stupid policy and special interest training like "Diversity in the Workplace", and misc. Ethics and IT security training. After working there for 10 years, I've had to retake the exact same training every year, it provides no value. Functional management only cares about time cards and training, not job performance, so long as you are not doing so bad someone is complaining about you.

Advice to Senior Management

Reduce number of people in "process" jobs, IRAD projects take too much convincing of management, innovation is hard to pre plan, there needs to be something like IRAD, that employees don't need to pre-sell to management. Look at Google's "20% time" policy.

Pros

Good, talented engineers who can solve any problem

Cons

Clueless management destroying the company

Advice to Senior Management

Shake up Garland management, not technical staff