I worked at Raytheon for almost 2 years, right out of college.

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.