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When you work for a large government contractor, you are basically just a warm body. In order to win a contract they have to have people ready to work immediately, but they don't know for sure if they will win a contract. What does this mean? It means sometimes they hire a whole bunch of people. In my case, I was a recent college grad and eager to get a job. Then a few months later they told me they didn't get the contract but they still want me to work for them, but I had 30 days to find a new position within the company or I was let go.
I found something in another city that was a little closer to where I live. They told me that I would be a Software Engineer and needed skills of Java and other coding languages. When I started the job they had me doing mundane tasks. I had to just follow some instructions and run some scripts about every couple of weeks. That was it. I was so bored out of my mind. I wanted to be a developer.
Being young and without experience though, it is hard to find a job. I was hoping that eventually I would work into another position. Eventually that happened 3 years later! And guess what... it only lasted 6 months. They they said under that contract they needed me to go back to doing the first task I was doing. I said heck no and changed companies.
They didn't pay well either. Probably pay pretty decent but other competitors and smaller companies pay better.
If you are looking for somewhere to work where there is virtually zero chance of advancement (unless you are a Leadership Development Program participant), but you will be paid as long as you choose to stay, then you've found your home. There are so many people that I work with that do absolutely nothing all day long and they are totally content with the arrangement. The only downside to that sort of lifestyle is if you are like me and actually want be something in life and have ambition, want to learn and grow and become an expert in your chosen field.
I have a Masters Degree in Electrical Engineering and I've spent the majority of the 8.5 years I've wasted at Lockheed adding two letter codes to an archaic database system, running errands (i.e. packing boxes and taking them to shipping) and doing mundane tasks that I could easily train a monkey to do. When I went back to Florida State for Career Day once, I ran into my graduate advisor and he was so appalled at what I was wasting my time doing that he couldn't even look me in the eye. I felt like such a loser because I started out with so much potential.
I've worked for so many technical managers who I'm supposed to learning from, but they have such a limited grasp of the most basic facets of electrical engineering that it would be comical if it wasn't my reality. Unfortunately, unless I get out very quickly, that too will become my fate. Everyday, massive amounts of brain cells die. If you end up stuck there, although I'm hoping that I don't end up in that situation, I would take classes from a university so I can keep your skills sharp and have accomplishments to add to my resume. There is tuition reimbursement, which is a good thing!
I think the end of a typical Lockheed Martin MFC Orlando career is massive brain cell dead leading to eventual cardiac arrest. But the 30 years leading up to that are comical, but only if I wasn't actually living it. The most recent horrid memory was watching my supervisor struggle for 15 minutes trying to figure out how to change the width of the "A" column in Excel so that he could see all the contents of the cells in that column. Another day I watched him spell Minnesota with two e's and wonder why Travelocity couldn't find that city. I'm supposed to be learning from this guy!!!! Another supervisor thought that he could make a digital logic divider by using a multiplier preceded by an inverter. I'll admit that last example is sort of technical, but no graduate of an accredited engineering school would find that funny. It's like addition and subtraction! Would you want to work for an accountant that didn't understand basic addition and subtraction? Learn from a doctor that didn't understand basic human physiology?
Bottomline: Steer clear of this division (I cannot speak about any of the other divisions) unless you want to get paid to do nothing, go nowhere and waste every day unlearning everything you learned in school. There are roughly 5 smart competent people holding the entire place up. The other 3995 employees seem to be there to meet some sort of quota so that they can get paid from the government. It's like having a landscaping company where you hire 200 people to mow one small yard. What task will the other 197 perform? It really doesn't matter because if you charge the homeowner $5 per person, pay the employee $2 and keep the remainder, the more employees you have sitting around on the job, the higher your profits will be.
Welcome to Lockheed Martin Missiles and Fire Control! It's a place where we more than likely don't need your talents and we only expect you to sit tight, enjoy your weekly pay check and continue to provide fodder for our sham of a diversity melting pot.
My advice to management is to be honest. If you need employees to simply fill positions but their talent is not needed or valued as part of the Lockheed Martin business plan, be honest at the interview. It might decrease the turn-over rate. When young eager ambitious college grads are promised one thing in the interview and then faced with a lifetime of web surfing and You Tube videos to pass the time, it leads to a massive exodus, which is what happened to 90% of the new grads that hired in with me 8-9 years ago. Realistically, there are individuals who want to be paid to do nothing with the guarantee that they will never go anywhere. They are the employees that remain employed at your facility. So, it shouldn't be hard to find more of them in the general population. Stop snagging up the smart ambitious ones, instead, allow them to work for your suppliers; because it takes very little skill to put puzzle pieces together, which is the task performed by the five actual workers at your integration house.
9/80 work week, 4 weeks of vacation time