1) seniority based promotions :: Naturally management and HR "spin" this to say they do not follow this practice but on numerous occasions that regardless of leadership or technical contribution to my projects as senior lead, I still did not receive a promotion. Reasons included a) not being at the my current position long enough; b) there were other engineers who had been waiting for a promotion longer.
2) no technical excellence :: there is little or no technical excellence remaining at the company. much of the engineering work is done from the books, with engineers being reduced to highly paid librarians for customers
3) aerospace engineering trumps all :: even though one of degrees is in the primary domain of the company, being an engineer of that domain (aerospace) trumps everything else. as a person with other degrees in software and computational engineering; I often encountered aerospace engineers who could not pass data structures 101 yet were leads for very visible, externally facing software projects.
4) everyone is a widget :: management regularly shuffles people around to different jobs as the company constantly tries to restructure. instead of making employees accountable, management instead places people in areas where they have zero experience or education that qualifies them for the position. I have seen people with zero engineering background other than act as technical editors become promoted into engineering; only to see them a few years later move to another engineering position in a startup program that requires actual engineer. Note, people with B.As in English literature are designing your airplanes you ride on.
5) lethargic, slow :: decisions that take 1 hour to 1 day in my current job have traditionally taken 6-12 months at the Boeing company.
6) drowning in people :: Q: How many Boeing engineers does it take to screw in a light bulb? A: All of them. In my current position we are empowered to make business decisions and enact solutions on a regular basis. More so, many customer-facing initiatives are started and finished in a day. I have seen similar functionality started at Boeing with 6 or more engineers and take 12-18 months.
7) there is no IT :: With the exception of IDS (Boeing's Integrated Defense Systems), if you wish to do anything remotely involved with software then this is not a good company to work for. Programmers are not trained for the work they do, or have any formal training in computer science or software engineering. If you are senior then your team will be composed primarily of people who do not about pointers or singly-linked lists. And if you are junior, you will never find anyone to help to develop your professional skills.
