Pros
- Benefits are top-notch, great 401k matching, full medical and pension... but slowly being cut back as the company gets pressed for cash - Ability to work on products or projects that you can't find at any other company, and a certain "cool" factor to your job if you're on the right product line - Lots of great coworkers, assuming again that you are in the right group - Many opportunities in such a large company - fairly easy to move around if you want to do something different - Seattle is a great city to live, work, and play - Good work/life balance and they value virtual/telecommuting work - The "Boeing" name can open the door to many other opportunities
Cons
- It's like Dilbert, but in real life - Can have a lot of lifers passing time until retirement, or dead weight in many groups - Things can take forever to be accomplished, and bureaucracy is taken to the extreme - Constant layoffs in IT have demoralized the workforce... sometimes it feels like the executives are the ones who benefit from the costs that they are able to save through layoffs - Outsourcing has killed the engineering culture... quality has suffered as a result - Pay is low compared to other companies (they tout the great benefits as making up for the low pay, but that is becoming less and less of an argument as they too get cut back) - Hard to be promoted despite doing an excellent job - tenure tends to be valued more than actual performance - Not a place for young, ambitious folks to stay for the long term - Can easily be pigeonholed doing the same thing for years if you aren't proactive in moving on to different assignments - Project management/integrator skills valued more over technical skills, which causes problems when people don't know how to design or support the systems anymore - Yearly bonuses tied to company performance, but non-union employees suffer when the union goes on strike and the entire company's performance is impacted for the year. Not exactly fair for us non-union employees who still had to work while the union was out on strike for several months.