Boeing reviews

It's a corporate behemoth, and a 100 year old company. It's stuck in the past with regards to some benefits such as parental leave and virtual work. Layers upon layers upon layers of management mean that your level of impact is relatively small and there is little room for personal innovation. With a company this large, unless you have an executive mentor or someone important who notices you, advancement is extremely slow. A lot of terrible first line managers who have no people skills. The company culture is kind of toxic in many jobs - there are a good amount of people who don't seem to care to excel and get by doing the minimum.

Huge software engineering turnover and for good reason. Management don't know what it means to develop software, so most projects end up crashing and burning miserably. Your manager is going to have some random degree and experience that has nothing to do with software, and their sole purpose for existing is to do politicking to navigate the bureaucratic mess that is Boeing. Tech fellows provide zero leadership as they are just as clueless about software development as management is. You will hear comments from them such as "Is C++ a managed language?", and no one can tell you why this is simply horrifying to hear from a high-level software engineer when your target language is.... c++. This is a side-effect of an interview process that is 100% behavioral and 0% technical. The type of interviews that politicians and psychopaths excel at. Every project has the stench of bad, bad, code smells. Multi-million dollar a year projects with 20-30 software engineers contributing with absolutely no standardized workflow. People literally just force push to master at will. No code review, no testing, copy-paste code, no CI, no lint or style guide, and huge amounts of resources spent reinventing (poorly) the wheel instead of using COTS software. If that doesn't make you recoil in horror read on. Very, very limited job growth opportunities. Ask any team and you'll find that there are level 1 engineers that have been working there for 4-5 years. If this is by design so that it encourages job hopping within Boeing so you get a more varied experience in your career, great! But wait, there's a high chance that even if you find an opportunity elsewhere, you won't be offered relocation. That 10k+ to move across country to get a miniscule raise is coming out of your pocket. This means there's no incentive to actually stay within the Boeing system. Your current wage is actually used as a negotiating strategy against yourself when finding a new job of interest. Management will often tout "But the benefits are great!" This is absolutely not the case. Health care insurance is strictly worse at Boeing than the two other companies I've worked at since. 3.6k deductible and a 7k out-of-pocket max with monthly premiums that are exactly the same as the traditional plans I got at the other companies. Pay is woefully under market value for a software engineer. If you're a mechanical, industrial engineer, I'm sure it's fine. But it simply doesn't match the lucrative market for software engineering, as Boeing lumps all engineers into one bucket. If you're stuck in the Charleston area, then I'm not sure there's a lot of better choices. If you're a young software engineer reading this fresh out of school thinking this is your opportunity to put a fortune 500 company on their resume, save yourself from wasting your time with what will be the inevitable. Do not come to Boeing South Carolina. The young software engineers that Boeing captures through its university outreach program leave in droves for a reason. I suggest embedding yourself in a tech city with multiple alternative opportunities if your first choice doesn't work out. If you think I'm exaggerating about any of this, due your own due diligence and please try the simple test of asking your interviewers brain dead CS questions like "what is a compiler?".