Amazing Product and Benefits, Tough Environment for Over-Acheivers
Pros
Awe inspiring products and manufacturing facilities. Employees have a truly unique opportunity to directly interact with all products. Best in industry 401K, tuition reimbursement, holidays, vacation and sick leave. Actual work-life balance. Very real career growth opportunities that almost all managers encourage; anyone can truly do anything at the company. Interesting business problems and worldwide customers that demand face to face engagement; international travel policy allows for business class travel as the standard. Most younger and middle-career employees have a deep passion for aviation and are generally great to be around.
Cons
Deeply depressing office environments – suburban or rural locations in run-down buildings with 1980s cubicle layouts. Think Office Space but with crappier coffee. Mind-numbing bureaucratic culture – enormous amounts of red tape that inhibit any one person from making decisions quickly. Sometimes it feels like nothing is happening around here. Legacy business systems that are 4-5 generations obsolete. Hours and hours of pointless meetings per month. Engineering and business leadership seem to think that decisions can only be made in meetings. Tons of deadweight, near-retirement employees who simply don’t care what you need from them. Boeing basically makes it impossible to lay these people off. Salary ceiling that lags behind other Seattle area companies; leadership has stated they simply will "not compete with Amazon, Microsoft and others" on salary leading to lots of turnover for younger employees. Many believe the company will slowly move work to friendlier ‘right to work’ states in the next 25 years. Senior executives are literally treated like royalty; private security, private drivers, fleets of private jets at their disposal. Sort of a bad look when they are always pushing for lower cost operations.