Defense contractors have a huge spectrum of work- some projects will be horrible projects maintaining legacy products with outdated technology and numerous security flaws, some will be using cutting-edge technology and will involve innovative things. There is a lot of bureaucracy, they often move slow, and the pay is often below industry standards. The current backlog of security clearance applications (in the US) means it could take years before you're fully onboard your program, and means that hiring help takes forever as well. If you end up on a great program they can be rewarding places to work, it's just a matter of being careful about choosing your opportunities.
My experience at a big defense contractor was like that. Huge spectrum of work. Fortunately I got to work on some very cool cutting edge (at the time) technology. We were developing wafer scale integration, doing things like inter-reticle stitching to make chips the size of an entire 4 inch wafer (4 inch wafers were common at the time). Through on-chip redundancy/self-testing/configuration we were getting 50% yield. It was pretty amazing. But so many other engineers were using stone-aged technology to field satellite systems, working under hugely bloated management structures where easily 20% of your time was spent reporting and accounting for hours and costs. For quite a few years I was clever enough or lucky enough to avoid ever having to work one of those dinosaur projects.
My god, the latency on a wafer sized die must have been incredible. Certainly such a beast wouldn't be used for logic... A 4 inch image sensor would be quite interesting though.
It was indeed logic. A pair of MACs, a pair of ALUs, big chunk of on-chip memory and a big ol' mess of wires to interconnect them all. Heavily pipelined. For use in signal processing applications where latency wasn't really a concern.
We dabbled with big image sensor arrays but the sparing for yield was messy and we never came to grips with how to deal with the situation where the working sensors were in random locations in the array. It seemed to really mess up all the important systems level calculations. We also never completely worked out testing. The big logic chip had BILBO blocks so we could just put it in self test mode, run a lot of clock cycles, check the signatures, and switch in the working blocks. The sensor array needed more than that. Perhaps solvable issues, but we never got around to it.
During my career, defense contractors have generally paid a lot more with much more generous benefits (I've seen fully employer paid 401K plans to the IRS maximum), and have been a much more stable employer. Since contract work hours are billable, you generally get paid for each hour you work, unless you are working for the wrong company and only get a salary. This naturally limits extra hours to those that are truly needed, and leads to a good work/life balance.
Other than stability, none of those applied to Raytheon while I was there.
The 401k match was 6% which, while good, didn't even come to what my wife gets from her non-profit. I was paying 25% of my health coverage, which is the highest proportion if any of my five employers. (I will day, though, that Raytheon had the best family coverage rates of any of them.)
I was salaried, and other than a few times was required to record no more than 40 hours in my timesheet regardless of how much time I needed to put in. The work/life balance was highly dependent on the program you were on, and I got trapped on a bad one.
Some parts make you pay 0% of health coverage. It varies.
If you were told to record no more than 40 hours in my timesheet, then that means you DO NOT put in more than 40 hours. You're supposed to go home. If you were told to stay and this was for a government contract, it's a violation that you're supposed to report. Unless this was decades ago, you got training that told you so.
Honestly, though, defense contractor pay is less location-dependent because a lot of the jobs are billed through to the DOD. Defense jobs can even best the industry--- just not in major areas with high costs of livi g.
I spent my time in the industry in Dallas, which is pretty close to the optimal balance of salary and metro area. My salary was not at industry averages. I remember, vaguely, Raytheon's salary bands. They weren't anything to write home about, and you were not getting anywhere near the top ends in a low COL location like Dallas.
It depends on who is judging. I recall that you were unemployed for quite a long time because nothing was up to your standard. This suggests that your impression of "industry standards" is inaccurate, at least for someone of your capability.
This may come as a surprise, but a lot of military contracting is stuff that many people find ethically un-troublesome. Most people within a military contractor are not working on new ways to kill poor brown people a world away or how to spy on a dissident. Plenty are working on how to preserve food better, or how to keep birds away from runways more cheaply or effectively, or how to detect malware. Or monitoring groundwater for contamination.
It could also be worth considering that anyone who makes the choice to work for such an employer has already reached ethical conclusions they are comfortable with.
I worked at Raytheon for almost 2 years, right out of college.
I worked in R&D, which sounds cool, but essentially means that you’re project’s budget is at the whim of the highest-level executives, who are utterly out of touch with the engineers (looking at the org chart, they’re literally 7-8 levels above me).
Because of that, EVERY single project that I was on was cancelled, due to budgetary reasons. The executives would get really excited about something new, and reallocate funds to new projects.
Nothing ever got done. I saw zero projects get shipped. I never saw a customer - because there’s is no customer. There’s not even a government contract. It’s internal R&D.
That's R&D in any industry. The question you're answering is not directly "how can we address what the customer needs today" but instead "what does basic science allow us to make within the purview of our company?"
I worked at a defense contractor, and aside from poorly managed bureaucracy (I submitted my clearance paperwork to Northrop, but Northrop didn't submit it externally for over a year), the main drag was being a company that billed the government hourly, which meant subtle / not-so-subtle cues to avoid cost underruns to the government by doing your job too quickly.
That bothered me for a while until I figured it out. After a while, I learned that underspent projects are your opportunity to learn new things, mentor junior people, and provide cushion to people waiting for their next projects.
The only thing I ever got reprimanded for was not spending my money - there are much harder problems to solve than that.
I mean there are plenty of places that pay well, allow you to work from home and have no real set hours. Those places have made me feel like my best years were not at college.
Not OP, but I spent a decent amount of time working for Honeywell's armor industry. On of the things that caused me to quit was the unspoken but very palpable excitement exhibited by higher level managers every time a conflict was brewing somewhere in the world (it almost didn't matter who was involved, some side involved was almost always buying our products). It's not a very morally uplifting environment.
It's a pretty common trope that you'll hear people saying this regardless of industry.
Is there anything else that lead you to feel you'll never work for a defense contractor?