Pros
Depending on what you want to do with your career, Raytheon can be a good place to start or stay. Bear in mind everything I'm saying is for the office in Portsmouth, RI, and for the biggest program over there, which is in a "maintenance stage", your experience might be very different in other programs/location. For a Software Engineer, unless you're planning to move to management or leadership and you REALLY like this industry (the military, defense, politics) I do not recommend you stay here too long as your skills as a "Software Developer" are going to quickly deteriorate and come to a halt, it might become really hard to get a job in Software/Technology companies after getting used to how things are done here. Salaries are comparable to other defense companies, but really below to what the market offers in commercial companies (When I switched to my current employee my salary literally doubled), Health Insurance is just bad, very expensive high deductive plans . Needless to say, there are a lot of great people here and I feel grateful for how well they treated me and all the opportunity I was given. Some of the highlights for the Pros: - There are some really nice and smart people that work here, people are willing to help you and guide you through on baby steps. - 9/80 schedule, you get every other Friday off (standard in Defense Contractors) - Modtime: you can adjust your schedule within reason to complete your hours for the week (this is double edge sword, as you are expected to record your time by the minute, more on this on the cons) - 10k Education Reimbursement (at least at the time I was there). - Overall a very relaxed environment (although this depends on the project/location), but in general you just worry about putting in your hours for the week and you're done. - 2 Weeks off in December because of the Holidays.
Cons
Oh boy... where do I start? There's a lot of things I didn't like about this place, and a lot of it is baked in the culture already, either because people here have only worked here and they don't know any better, or "that's just how things are" in the defense industry. There is a lot "Factory Worker" mentality here (at least with Software Engineers), you're expected to record your hours by the minute, and by that, I mean that different task/projects get different "charge codes" allocated to them and you're supposed to record and "charge" to those "codes" for every task you do. That leads to some really awkward moments, like meetings that you have to "make up" the time for because there is no charge code associated with them. A lot of people avoid company events because that would mean that you would have to end up making up the time for it (All-hands meetings, different organizations activities, etc). A lot of the mandatory training you'll have to make up in you're own time (although leadership was trying to change this by the time left). Yup, you read that right "MANDATORY TRAINING" on "YOUR OWN TIME", and we're not talking about training that is going to be useful to you in your career as an Engineer, I mean "Ethics" module and what not... This factory mentality leads to other things like holidays only providing you 8 hours to charge on 9 hour days and you having to make up 1 hour for every holiday. Work from home, allowed in certain programs, but very discouraged, you'll have to write a direct letter to your supervisor and manager explaining where you're going to "spend those hours". Snowday? Forget it, you can just do mod time or PTO. I even heard they were trying to make people use PTO or make mod time during the COVID-19 crisis. These are things that would be unacceptable in any other company, but here everybody is used to it so everybody dismisses it as "is just the way it is". My last point, probably the most important one and the reason I left, is that you won't be doing a lot of "Engineering" here. The biggest program here is the "maintenance" stage. Meaning that you'll be going through a big pile of technical debt trying to fix bugs and implement minor functionality. All of these with technology decades old, no tools and vision to fix the root of the problems(IDE? nah we use vim, Version Control? You'll be stuck with Clearcase, etc...). Don't expect to be attending seminars about the latest industry trends and/or best practices, don't even think about doing training outside the corporate modules about the technologies you're currently working with (which again, are at least 15 old). At the end of the day, if for some reason the program you're working loses funding (common in defense), you'll have a very weak foundation to continue your career in Software, at least outside defense.