Raytheon / RTX employee here. I can attest this is just the tip of the iceberg in corporate wastefulness. This company excels in having bloated middle management that does nothing and protects itself. Its lifeblood is earned value management theater.
If something they know is underbid is already late and over budget they will shrug and just rebid. I really think it’s done on purpose with the right engineers who understand the real costs excluded from providing inputs on the original bid, so that RTX can win the bid against competitors without being caught in an audit as knowingly withholding information. Then management acts all surprised Pikachu face when things aren’t on schedule and are over budget.
Compounding this is the fact that management will not hire competent engineers much of the time. When they do it’s a freak accident. Part of this is on the government’s head with the way earned value management staffing works. You have to magically staff heads at certain times during the program to keep the schedule. But what do you do the rest of the time with the staff when there is no work? Layoffs, if you can’t find another program for them to work. It’s hard to keep competent people around this way. So for staffing programs to be compliant, middle management will throw whatever warm bodies they can find. This means that for any program about only 10-20% of the engineering staff are doing the real work and are exhausted while the rest are deadweight. Kabuki theater staffing, I call it. If you dare point out these performance issues with employees you will be gaslit. None of these managers want to have to explain to their managers how so many employees that they hired can’t do the work—upper management wouldn’t believe it!
This company is always at least 10 years behind commercial in using basic sane technology. Most of my career has been plagued with using Clearcase instead of a decent tool like git. They just finally started switching over, but not every program can due to how they sold the customer Clearcase too. And some of our US government bureaucracies/agencies are very slow to switch to anything new and will force the contractor to use it too.
There seems to be some sort of sweetheart deal with a certain small AI company that RTX got in bed with and put in some venture capital into. You know, for the employees to use to speed us up. It’s a complete piece of garbage. Everyone at work who has played with other AIs at home keeps asking at company town halls why aren’t we getting Claude? It can run air gapped too with its enterprise plan! But the VP who decided this will not listen. We’re stuck with something that makes destructive edits and has the universe’s smallest context size.
Raytheon / RTX employee here. I can attest this is just the tip of the iceberg in corporate wastefulness. This company excels in having bloated middle management that does nothing and protects itself. Its lifeblood is earned value management theater.
If something they know is underbid is already late and over budget they will shrug and just rebid. I really think it’s done on purpose with the right engineers who understand the real costs excluded from providing inputs on the original bid, so that RTX can win the bid against competitors without being caught in an audit as knowingly withholding information. Then management acts all surprised Pikachu face when things aren’t on schedule and are over budget.
Compounding this is the fact that management will not hire competent engineers much of the time. When they do it’s a freak accident. Part of this is on the government’s head with the way earned value management staffing works. You have to magically staff heads at certain times during the program to keep the schedule. But what do you do the rest of the time with the staff when there is no work? Layoffs, if you can’t find another program for them to work. It’s hard to keep competent people around this way. So for staffing programs to be compliant, middle management will throw whatever warm bodies they can find. This means that for any program about only 10-20% of the engineering staff are doing the real work and are exhausted while the rest are deadweight. Kabuki theater staffing, I call it. If you dare point out these performance issues with employees you will be gaslit. None of these managers want to have to explain to their managers how so many employees that they hired can’t do the work—upper management wouldn’t believe it!
This company is always at least 10 years behind commercial in using basic sane technology. Most of my career has been plagued with using Clearcase instead of a decent tool like git. They just finally started switching over, but not every program can due to how they sold the customer Clearcase too. And some of our US government bureaucracies/agencies are very slow to switch to anything new and will force the contractor to use it too.
There seems to be some sort of sweetheart deal with a certain small AI company that RTX got in bed with and put in some venture capital into. You know, for the employees to use to speed us up. It’s a complete piece of garbage. Everyone at work who has played with other AIs at home keeps asking at company town halls why aren’t we getting Claude? It can run air gapped too with its enterprise plan! But the VP who decided this will not listen. We’re stuck with something that makes destructive edits and has the universe’s smallest context size.
Sounds like lots of trouble there due to incompetence. Just like NASA, would you agree?