I am an engineer so the issues I am reporting might be a bit different – Lockheed is a huge company and different people have different experiences, some people love it, some people hate it – it’s hard to give a singular view into what our company is.
You will work overtime and you will not get paid. You’ll put in up to a day of extra work regardless if you have to work or not, this is a cultural thing, unless you stick around and pretend you work and you are busy people think that you are not working hard. Also, you will work weekends frequently. Going home on time will put you on the chopping during the next round of layoffs, and trust me there will be a lot of layoffs.
You will get very little respect from the program office or executive management, you will hear people yelling at engineers even for minor issues affecting any element of the production cycle.
I work in Owego (NY) – this is a production facility, so there will be no R&D done here. If you like cutting edge stuff and if you like development and design, you may want to look somewhere else. You will also see that the culture values technicians much more than engineers, some technicians are getting paid better than Level 2 and Level3 Lockheed engineers – this is stupid. You will also see that technicians are laid off less frequently than engineers.
Healthcare is turning into a pathetic comedy – it’s getting worse every year. You’ll basically get a catastrophe insurance where if you have large medical bills it will save you money, but for many minor issues you are not covered – 100% outta your pocket… -Layers and layers of management.
Finally, going back to layoffs. In about 2 years there were four major layoffs and two smaller ones. There is some discrimination here as older guys are being targeted – they are paid fairly well and the company discards them – you do not want to stick around here longer than a couple of year – you will sooner or later be laid off by Lockheed and if you are paid well you are almost guaranteed a pink slip… People are in fear, have families to feed and provide for, the work is unstable and there is no respect or loyalty to employees.