Do you have any examples of this type of company? I'm a sophomore CS student looking to work in Aerospace, and this type of company, where the work is done in a self driven manner and where the work matters, that I'd love to work for.
Just don't expect the big software firms to be knocking on your door if you need those bullets on your resume (unless you have a PHD).
Also, prepare to work in a formal-verification development environment. Some aerospace jobs are like this, which basically means code moves as slow as molasses. If it's flight control software, you may find yourself writing 20 pages of documentation/paperwork for every one page of code. (Think about it, if your code could destroy a $12 million jet engine, you should be pretty confident your code actually works, right ?). So research CMMI [1] and if that is a dealbreaker for you, make sure you avoid those kinds of jobs.
[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Capability_Maturity_Model_Inte...