Even before I started at the company, their HR department had no clue what they were doing. I had to do their job for them and get every piece of information they needed to complete the background check. How hard is it to go to Google and look up the HR number for my previous employers? I should have known it was bad omen. They kept me in the dark about my start date until day before. HR did such a bad job, I didn't have a desk, phone, or computer assigned to me for almost a month!
The Northrop Grumman program leadership is more incompetent about doing their job than the HR department. Their heads are stuck in the 60's so they have no clue about how to write good software. Good coding practices, such as design patterns and abstraction, are not only looked down upon, but the people trying to fix the code are yelled at. They are forced to write absolutely unmaintainable code. Highly nested 3,000+ functions are commonplace. Fixing a bug with that kind structure usually breaks 18 other things. The program leadership also looks down upon using tools because in the 60's everyone used Vi or Emacs. Those programs are great for editing files once in a while, but tools are made for a reason: they make programmers more productive and problems can be debugged faster. No wonder most of their projects are over budget and 5 years behind schedule.
The corporate leadership is worse than the program leadership because they tolerate the program leadership's abusive behavior. The people doing the real work are typically yelled at for doing exactly what the program leadership tells them to do. I'm sure the corporate leadership notices trends with employees quitting due to abusive leads, yet the corporate leadership does nothing. They allow the program leads to continue abusing the employees and lead their programs into a shark infested waters.
Northrop Grumman's work friction does not end with the leadership; there are many road blocks to actually trying to do a good job. The IT department blocks all useful internet content. This is understandable for most companies since they don't want their employees chatting with their Facebook buddies the whole day, but Northrop's IT department is so strict it interferes with work. They block Subversion, CVS, Git, or any configuration management protocol so developers can't look at good code examples. Many development blogs that post solutions to for common problems are completely blocked. Software Engineers are not given administrative rights to their computers so they cannot install the necessary development tools to get the job done. Developers have to put in requests to get anything useful installed, but there is so much red tape within the company that it takes months to get the tools needed to do a good job.
With all the bad leadership and pains to get work done, at least the office environment and corporate perks make up for it, right? Northrop didn't get that right either. Employee morale is an absolute afterthought. There are no basics. Water coolers are not provided. Employees have the option of paying $5.00 a month to join a water club when a water cooler should have been provided for free. Horrible Foldgers cofffee is also offered for $0.25 a cup. The El Segundo site is also so old, sometimes saw dead cockroaches are visible in the hallways.
I do not recommend Northrop Grumman to any software developer. You will throw your skill set away and deal with unnecessary stress. If you're going to do that, you might as well work at coffee shop for minimum wage because at least you'll have a good time interacting with nice people.
