In the tough times of the past few years, it has become policy to justify lower raises and lack of promotion by intentionally rating employees lower in their performance reviews. The charge number system, so common in aerospace companies, discourages employees from cooperating with each other and stifles innovation. Years of short-sighted decision making has left the company sluggish, overpriced, and unresponsive to customer needs. They talk endlessly about cross-training and eliminating single-point failures, but in practice, they don't do much to make it happen. With all the ups and downs in the satellite business, it has become accepted that you have to constantly sleep with your resume under your pillow, and watch your work jealously. It leads to a lot of pettiness. Management responds to bad feedback by suggesting that it is due to their failure to communicate properly how wonderful they are. Managers aren't there to enable their employees to get the job done. Instead, they use their employees to win the buzzword bingo game on their resume, prioritizing inconsequential tasks that have buzzwords, while leaving employees to fend for themselves on the important tasks. In other words, they're managing upside down. Every manager's full time job is to look good to the manager above them and, therefore, to make them look good, in the short term. Processes seem designed to increase cost and decrease productivity. The company is very much geared towards "systems engineers". Other disciplines are sometimes not considered with as much respect or consideration.
