It's a pretty common trope that you'll hear people saying this regardless of industry.
Is there anything else that lead you to feel you'll never work for a defense contractor?
Is there any defense contractor that pays anywhere near industry standards?
Honestly, though, defense contractor pay is less location-dependent because a lot of the jobs are billed through to the DOD. Defense jobs can even best the industry--- just not in major areas with high costs of livi g.
The 401k match was 6% which, while good, didn't even come to what my wife gets from her non-profit. I was paying 25% of my health coverage, which is the highest proportion if any of my five employers. (I will day, though, that Raytheon had the best family coverage rates of any of them.)
I was salaried, and other than a few times was required to record no more than 40 hours in my timesheet regardless of how much time I needed to put in. The work/life balance was highly dependent on the program you were on, and I got trapped on a bad one.
If you were told to record no more than 40 hours in my timesheet, then that means you DO NOT put in more than 40 hours. You're supposed to go home. If you were told to stay and this was for a government contract, it's a violation that you're supposed to report. Unless this was decades ago, you got training that told you so.
We dabbled with big image sensor arrays but the sparing for yield was messy and we never came to grips with how to deal with the situation where the working sensors were in random locations in the array. It seemed to really mess up all the important systems level calculations. We also never completely worked out testing. The big logic chip had BILBO blocks so we could just put it in self test mode, run a lot of clock cycles, check the signatures, and switch in the working blocks. The sensor array needed more than that. Perhaps solvable issues, but we never got around to it.
It could also be worth considering that anyone who makes the choice to work for such an employer has already reached ethical conclusions they are comfortable with.
I worked in R&D, which sounds cool, but essentially means that you’re project’s budget is at the whim of the highest-level executives, who are utterly out of touch with the engineers (looking at the org chart, they’re literally 7-8 levels above me).
Because of that, EVERY single project that I was on was cancelled, due to budgetary reasons. The executives would get really excited about something new, and reallocate funds to new projects.
Nothing ever got done. I saw zero projects get shipped. I never saw a customer - because there’s is no customer. There’s not even a government contract. It’s internal R&D.
The only thing I ever got reprimanded for was not spending my money - there are much harder problems to solve than that.
Age discrimination is generally much less, but can be a problem on certain contracts. Sometimes the government thinks they'll save a bundle by getting less experienced people to do the work. They usually repent of that the next time a contract comes out. The experienced / good people can always find another contract to go to.
I've seen all manner of processes from very well done agile, to poorly done agile, to waterfall, to no process at all.
On call depends on the contract, but is not typical.
Picking something more normal, Tesla pays software developers just $78k to $147k. Raytheon can beat that. This is without even trying to adjust for hours (a 9-to-5 place, or Elon Musk cracking the whip) or the fact that Raytheon locations typically have a far lower cost of living. Just on raw numbers, totally unadjusted, Raytheon wins.
Google pays almost nobody. The whole firm, called Alphabet, has just 98,771 full-time employees. Most of those are not really "in the world of tech" though, with many devoted to stuff like marketing and human resources. It looks like about 40,000 are engineering talent, but not all of that will be software.
There are over 40 million software developers. At most, about 1 in 1000 work at Google. Again this assumes that all the technical staff at Alphabet is software developers working for Google, but that assumption is clearly wrong. There are hardware people working on cars and phones and more.
That 0.1% is practically nothing. Approximately nobody works for Google. It is just crazy to use Google as a standard for tech pay.
It's like asking why an athlete would be a gym teacher when the NFL pays so much better. It's like asking why a person would give kids private music lessons when you can make so much more money singing like Madonna. It's like asking why a person would be a mayor instead of being the US president.
Furthermore...
You are incorrect about the benefits being offered at defense contractors. Some do have free food, bonuses, decent pay, and even stock options. I've gotten all those things at defense contractors. Another advantage is a 40-hour work week. Another advantage of many defense contractors (not all) is that your coworkers are trustworthy American citizens who don't behave erratically; they have all passed a background check.
The particular complaints I heard were all about bureaucracy, time tracking, accountability, etc. I can sympathize, but I know some people with the right personality type who thrive in that environment.
Defense has rules around supply chain enforcement. Everything you do has to be auditable.
Some people can't stand living under that kind of microscope, with such rigid rules and procedures. Some people struggle to be productive in this environment, even though they are perfectly productive in other environments. Same thing applies to other environments... some personality types won't usually thrive at small companies, but do well at large companies, and vice versa.
It’s not that defense is inherently toxic or good, I’d like to be clear what I’m saying. I’m saying that whatever good or bad management you have, there is a ton of legal compliance you have to deal with on top of that. So the baseline level of frustration an bureaucracy is higher than what you might be used to, even with good management. But this makes sense! Development OF COURSE slows down as soon as you are, say, building something that will affect whether somebody lives or dies.
Some amazing, skilled, productive engineers work in defense.
Same with medical technology. They tell stories of the Therac-25 to scare people away in college, and in spite of that, people are still willing to put in the work to make new radiotherapy devices, even with all the red tape.
Same with civilian (non-defense) aerospace.
I worked as a developer at a large bank and it had a very similar environment. I enjoyed it a lot, and I absolutely despise startup culture.
Some things that I personally enjoyed:
- In general older coworkers from academic backgrounds, more diverse, more grounded. The one gig I had a small startup felt like boyscout summercamp.
- no marketing, no attention seeking, no childish competition, work focussed on actual work. People left when the workday was over.
- Generally interesting technical challenges, not really consumer facing, very little fuzz about the newest frameworks or management styles or whatever, progress was measured, teamwork was valued over individualism.
- Very reliable career opportunities. If you do well you have a career to look forward to, no rapid up and down or hopping around.
Being in college while young, hopeful, newly independent, without major responsibilities, and close together with thousands of others creating lifelong friendships really is one of the best times of many people's lives.