Love Coming to Work - Engineer SEAKR Engineering Employee Review

Need to put all of these in context: - It's hard. Some people actually see this as a negative. I enjoy the technical challenge, but there are plenty of people in this world with engineering degrees that just want a crank to turn. If that's your bag, go to the primes. - Pay is very low for the area No denying it. Every engineer here knows they could move to Lockheed and get an instant 30-40k a year increase. In the past year, I've had salaries of 130-150k floated to me for my role, and I make about 85k. Of course, working at Lockheed or Ball has some serious drawbacks, but only a fool would think that a giant bag of money like that is not an incentive for good people to look elsewhere. Granted, money is of minimal interest to me....but I'm not the norm. - Zero onboarding There is no formal or informal training system set up for new hires (at least for technical staff). This is not to say that mentorship doesn't exist - it does, but only if you seek it out yourself. You're going to have to hammer it out for yourself. The company very much has a "sink or swim" mentality. Also, a some people that want to have technical roles wind up pushing paper. You have to assert yourself and actively manage your career or depend on Lady Luck. I've always found her to be tempestuous on her best days. - Overtime All overtime is unpaid (as it should be). But folks in certain roles are expected to put in as many hours as is required to get the job done. This isn't really a "seat time" requirement - it's more of a "does the unit actually pass the tests?" job. - Program Management This is my one real bone to pick - management perenially signs up programs for unrealistic schedules, timelines, costs, design constraints, etc. that are completely untenable. Granted, some of that is the customer asking for round squares that have negative mass while being invisible, but also blue (looking at you Lockheed), while landing on the surface of the sun. But the majority is program management never bothering to try to tell the customer that "No, you cannot in fact hammer a square peg the size of a Buick through the eye of a needle." Not all problems have solutions. Program management doesn't push back on customer fetishes nearly enough. I'm sorry, if you want a widget that does X, Y, and Z and you want it in 18 months, then you're going to have to make some design concesssions. But management signs up the technical staff to things that are unrealistic and all sorts of mania has to happen at the end of the program in order to meet requirements. - An unrealistic dependence upon "heritage" The entire industry loves the idea of "heritage" because of the perception that the risk is minimal. Trouble is, your designs have not flown before. Management has fallen in love with the notion that because they convinced a customer in eternity past to fly something in one configuration, it must be fine for every customer in the future, regardless of how its used. It is very easy for aerospace (the industry) to fool itself. This is endemic within the industry, but because SEAKR is a small company, the consequences for screwing up a "heritage" design are huge. Management would love to konw these sorts of things, but not entirely clear that they're given the complete story (at least, until it blows up in their face).