Johns Hopkins University Applied Physics Laboratory Reviews

Pros

Support- proud place to work

Pros

Great benefits and challenging work.

Advice to Management

When you ask your employees for suggestions why don't you consider taking them.

Pros

Great work/life balance. Lots of potential to work on really interesting projects. As an employee, you have a lot of say on what you want to work on, and how you want your career to develop. Easy to do work outside of your "title," assuming you have the necessary skills.

Advice to Management

Try to instill a more unified culture and set of processes. Additionally, invest in the tools necessary for software engineers to more easily do their jobs.

Pros

Disovery Program for new hires allows you to rotate among several groups and explore for a period of 2 years

Learning is encouraged - the APL Education Center offers on-site graduate courses through JHU's Whiting School of Engineering

Individual research is supported by proposal competitions and allowing one hour per day to be devoted to anything

schedules are extremely flexible, as long as you work 80 hours in a 2 week period

a lot of vacation time

Pros

APL allows and highly encourages you to adopt a large amount of autonomy. As long as you maintain good communication with your technical leads and supervisors, you can take initiative on almost anything that you think needs to be addressed on your project, without having to go through any tedious or bureaucratic justification process that is present in some other organizations.

Management is receptive and responsive to staff who desire to shift their career in a different direction. Staff who feel unfulfilled or underutilized on their current project can typically find a new project to spend their time on in less than 6 months. Each staff member’s time is typically split amongst multiple projects to minimize the risk of any bumps or issues in a single project. Staff ask have a good amount say in how their time is divided amongst these projects.

APL also fosters a culture of continuing education and mentorship through several formal and informal programs. The lab will fund staff’s endeavors to take new classes and learn new skills, and has several programs in place to promote informal skill sharing between staff. Formal mentoring programs exist for mentees of all skill and experience levels, and management strongly encourages technical leads to act as mentors for the people working under them.

There is also significantly less focus on finger-pointing than some other peer organizations. When something goes wrong, the scrutiny is placed on the process, not solely the people involved. Newcomers and early career staff are given plenty of resources and people to reach out to as they continue to establish their skills, so that they feel confident in their efforts.

Advice to Management

Make sure that technical staff really understand the vision of the lab and the strategic goals that the lab is pushing for in the next decade. An easy-to-find summary of these goals with links to more detailed descriptions of how the lab hopes to achieve them would go a long way. It’s common for new staff to end up isolated in their own projects without knowing about other projects going on in the lab that they might find interesting. APL has started taking steps towards counteracting this; continue to make it a priority.

Pros

Great benefits, generous vacation, flexible schedules and no dress code

Pros

Great environment and community. Excellent resources

Pros

Provided full move expenses for 30 days. Hotel, rental car, and shipped all household goods plus car and motorocycle

Pros

Flexibility in working across multiple sectors on multiple projects. Management invests in training and education of employees.

Pros

This is a pretty comfortable place to work. The benefits are some of the best that are out there. You won't be too stressed out here unless you take on a lot of projects beyond your available time.

Advice to Management

Some thought should be given as to how to fundamentally set up a different organizational structure so things are flattened. This goes against the traditional way things are done in this industry but it could really be beneficial. The current way things are set up makes it so engineering groups become like cliques and don't collaborate even when 50% of their "swim lane" overlaps with another group. This prevents a lot of progress since you have brilliant people in different groups who work on very similar things that never interact/collaborate.