Obi_Kwiet
It's Stuart, Martha Stuart
Posts: 7,943
My impression was the engineers have a far less antagonistic relationship with management compared to Seattle. We could show up when we wanted to and leave when we wanted to, as long as we put in our time. One guy abused that pretty heavily and got a talking to, but far less than I'd have thought. Some people put in a lot of hours because they were hiding from their family, or they just had no life, but most people just did 9-5. Everyone was old, though, so that was weird.
The real issue is that it's defense. The military makes large ponderous corporations look like a well oiled machine. The bureaucracy is beyond belief. We always used to joke about that 60 minutes episode with the defense contractor that charged the military 900 dollars for a hammer, because it'd be easy for the contractor to loose money on that deal. So much of it isn't for any real strategic reason either. It's just layers of awful, worthless people trying to justify their power and their position without making an real decisions. We were mostly on cost + fee contracts, so we were making a profit, but Boeing was generally the one that had to lobby against the insane wastefulness, because our short term gain was bad for the program in the long run, especially since it hurt the competitiveness of the product in the international market.