Comment by euler_angles | Hacker News Reader

Comment by euler_angles | Hacker News Reader

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In one of my past jobs I was a Level 3 Electronics Engineer for LM, and I made right at the middle of the pay band. It paid okay, but lower than someone doing my same job at the same place but working for Northrop Grumman made. I saw many people jump from LM to NGC just to get a big pay bump while doing the same work.

But LM is actively trying to reduce its number of Level 5, 6, and 7 engineers (the highest paybands on the technical career track). You would typically find a Level 5 engineer serving as an engineering technical team lead, a Level 6 as a site deputy chief engineer, and a Level 7 as a site chief engineer. A few years ago, LM Aeronautics offered all Level 5 and above engineers an early buyout/retirement and got over 1000 engineers to leave the company that way. Those engineers were largely not replaced, either in skills (hard to replace that level of expertise), billets (those jobs were not re-filled), or promotions (the sudden vacuum at the top end of the technical career pyramid was not filled by promoting large numbers of level 4 engineers to level 5, etc).

So hang on, let me rephrase this: Lockheed has basically fired most of its most highly experienced engineering talent? Is that right?

What did Lockheed hope to accomplish by this move?

Do you know what the total realized effect was?

Not fired, that would indicate termination for cause. This was an early buyout. Engineers at those levels were offered a severance package that included some number of weeks of pay per years spent with the company (up to a maximum of 6 months of pay) and a base amount on top of that.

This was the precursor to layoffs -- LM hoped to avoid layoffs by offering buyouts to these engineers. The wisdom of all of this... I don't see it.

Their goal was to reduce total amount spent on salaries.

This came at the time that the F-35 flight test program began its long wind-down. Other companies were hiring in large numbers because they had just begun big test programs (NGC had just won the B-21 contract and was testing its Triton UAVs), the net effect was that a HUGE amount of engineering knowledge and talent went out the door within a year. I can only speak for what it did to the F-35 test forces -- basically made them start over in terms of learning how to execute their jobs.

Only 6 months max - that's cheap BT in the UK used back in the day get up to 18 months tax free and 6.5 years on your pension.

Hence a lot of experienced Mobile engineers took the buy out and went to work with the competition and got a pay rise to boot in their new jobs

I have one word for it: profit

Companies do this all the time for all levels. It was basically an early retirement buyout. There’s a big Lockheed plant in my area and I’m pretty sure all managers, engineers, plant workers, etc were all offered buyouts. Everyone with 3 or so years until retirement.

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