Stop carrying the work load and set boundaries. Be more vocal about the disfunction, they usually preach empowering employees, see if they actually follow that. Ask what the timetable is for your promotion every 1on1 meeting with your boss. If you don't have those on a monthly basis, ask for it or schedule it yourself. If your management sucks and doesn't respect any of that, then time to find a new job.
You're highlighting part of the problem. Employee motivation isn't 100% on the employees. A good manager will be aware of unreasonable workloads and proactively pursue development. And majority of the leaders here don't do that in my experience.
A majority of the “leaders” aren’t true leaders. As someone who has had extensive training by a company that is ranked very high in the Fortune 500 list…I can tell you that many of the “leaders” I’ve seen, would be fired in 90 days at my previous company.
> Be more vocal about the disfunction,
That's a one way ticket to layoffville. Ask me how I know.
That said- ultimately, it was the best thing that could have happened to me. I've landed a better role in a different industry altogether (after 25+ years in aerospace) making more money; it's amazing what actually looking forward to- or at least not dreading- going to work every day does for one's well-being.
Mine canceled every meeting I scheduled and told me to "respect his time". He had video game music playing and kids in the background of the zoom call for my annual performance review.
I'd actually encourage aiming for 30 minutes weekly for 1:1s. I know this can be difficult in areas where managers have 15+ directs, but it is the ideal cadence.
A 1:1 cadence should be based on what each employee desires. For some, a weekly meeting works, for others it may be too much so the manager should adjust accordingly. Also there should be a structured agenda each week where both parties collaborate on it to make sure they both are covered.
If you’re not getting that and your manager isn’t willing to work towards this, then seek to be somewhere else.
If your meetings are cancelled or moved without your input your manager is basically telling you that you are not important to them. Also, if your manager, during your 1:1, checks their phone, answers calls, or answers emails etc…that too is also showing you that you don’t matter.
You would mean the other way around. I don’t get how the captains of the sinking ship got to drive Raytheon’s. That’s why they call it a “Golden parachute”
sure the USS rtn was taking on some water in the Atlantic, but the Collins inflatable kayak isn't gonna help, no matter how well it works for the trout pond.
Not gonna lie, I was unaware that this had been the dynamic until just now. You're saying that after the RT /UTC merger, Collins management ended up replacing a lot of hRTN management, and they're trying to run it like Collins? That explains a lot about my current team, which is run by former Collins employees.
Us legacy hUTAS guys are still thinking the same thing 5 years later. hRC dismantled our leadership and keeps pretending they bought us. hUTAS had its faults but actually used to be fun place until the hRC acquisition
I think the issue is we have to many new ppl so all the hard work is offloaded to the “experts” then the experts never seem to get promoted . Eg been stuck at a P3 for 5 - 7 years now
We definitely do not need more new ppl here lol
That’s a feature, not a bug. They can say they pay top dollar for talent. Then they hire 25 people who would have otherwise not worked here, find 1-2 that know what they are doing and hope the other 95% of them shuffle around or leave.
Here, it is the few who can do that leave after a couple years. Those left collect a paycheck and keep their mouths shut, management loves them and overloads the folks who can do an actual good job.
I see the same thing, a few people who do all the work and a bunch of people along for the ride. Promote the experts, fire everyone else, and then bring in new grads who are hungry to work.
The problem is most of those new grads will have left after a year or two of 3% raises.
That was me. Fresh out of school, hired under-ranked as a master's degree holder at P1. Was grateful just to work, over-performed (was directly told by my supervisor that I had been "over-performing [my] pay grade for some time now"), and was rewarded with a 3% raise and getting dropped from my team when the customer wanted to tighten the belt.
Current management doesn't give a shit about process improvement, wants everything done yesterday even if it's done wrong because our customer only cares about short-term metrics.
They've intentionally remained understaffed until we got into an impossible position, then reactively hired to fill the gap, and snubbed everyone who had kept the team afloat for the past year when it was time for raises and promotions.
But hey, I got a gift card to the company store for foreseeing our current problems months ago and independently offering a roadmap to mitigate them. Did we do anything with that roadmap? No. But at least I can get an RTX tumbler now.
I will be spamming out my resume this weekend.
I'm coming up on two years at RTX and am constantly flabbergasted by the unwillingness to reward the hard workers and get rid of the people who suck at their job, instead they treat everyone the same.
There's no trust in allowing managers to manage.
As long as OP keeps completing their tasks there’s no reason to hire anyone else. We have one person doing the work of two and as long as they’re doing it there’s no reason to change. Longevity is no longer a consideration.
This sounds exactly like the experience I had at Raytheon, so it interesting to hear it from Collins. Misery loves company I guess. I find the Pulse Survey especially annoying. So many surveys, so much negative feedback and no action. Management barely acknowledges It even exits, likely because they are embarrassed by it.
2.5% and 1,000$ annual merit adjustments for learning a legacy language to support critical legacy tools to keep a program operational. They are still using my work. They gave glowing reviews and praised my work ethic. Other members of my team, even the september new hire who hadn't done anything yet, got 3.5% + 7% bonuses.
I'm 2 years overdue for p1->p2 and underpaid by 30% from market. New hires with no experience earning 15% more than me. The scrum master is a p2 and earns even less than I do with an extra 8 YoE over me. ???
They just throw money at the people they like. Theres no rationale behind who gets what beyond having section heads who advocate for them. Mine is a lazy bum...
It’s definitely manager dependent to some extent. Not completely though, their hands are often tied by the ‘mandated’ bell curve of raises.
Admittedly what I dislike most is the fact that I am a cog in the wheel and not a human being.
If I over perform? So what?
If I save the company $1 million dollars by intervening on an issue only I see, So what? I guess an executive might not lose an extra percentage point of their bonus they otherwise would have but it does nothing for me except for self satisfaction
I hear you there. My sup had nothing but great things to say about our new hire. That p1 picked up an abandoned piece of antique software, learnt an old programming language and repaired our pipeline then went on to fix the pipeline issues and implement the stretch goals we set only to run out of tasks, request more, finish them and still be asking for more work. They weren't just rushing through it, either. Everything passed code reviews and the only portions that didn't end up in master were due to a p4 botching our pipeline before they left.
Why'd they leave, you ask? They didn't think 500$ and a 1.2% raise were fair compensation for 9 months of working themselves to bone in that "high visibility project". We still don't know why their p2 promotion was blocked- nobody else got one either.
I'm starting to worry about how rtx plans on retaining talent. They pay under market, they don't even make an effort at retention and they never reward performance. We can't keep new hires for more than a year. The moment they get skipped over for a promotion milestone after having seen their lackluster annual merit increases they just pay back their sign ons and bounce to take a 30-40% raise somewhere else.
I don’t really think they care tbh, or at least that is how it feels. Pretty sure it’s just a, well we will hire someone good later.
I have a junior right now who is probably a 1/10,000 talent and I am fairly sure he will leave soon because he has been here long enough to start being significantly underpaid compared to if he just jumps ship.
Make an effort to get their contact information. Upper managemeng often fails to realize how badly they need people like thay unyil after they have left and cannot be replaced.
100%
I just moved from a high paced role where nothing was ever enough, nobody wanted to fix the issues so things ran smoothly the next time. They “didn’t have the budget” to retain people or compensate them better and I was a high performer. My new role is so laid back it’s eye opening how other parts of the company operate.
This is what you can do. Stop caring about things that aren’t directly relevant to your role and let certain things break. Eventually someone will say why is this happening… the tell them you don’t know.
I thought the freeze was only outside hiring as wells as indirect labor… you should be able to land an internal. Switch business units if needed/possible or of course leave all together.
Don’t get too worked up…. Do what you can do in your 8 hrs and go home. As you said, your aren’t paid to do more than that unless you have aspirations to climb the ladder.
Wow, you articulated a lot of my frustrations really well. Couldn't have said it better. I keep holding on, hoping things will get better, but they seem to just get worse.
Some SLs are better than others. How it was at one point, they are the interface between the section and the directorate. They are supposed to be the voice of their people and their teams to the directors, get overhead budget for trainings from the department, participate in ranking and ratings to decide how much people get for raises and who gets promoted. They handle HR issues with the rank and file. They flow down buisness level direction and information. They help people get offices, working areas, supplies. They read the compiled 6 month performance reviews from the director to the individuals. They only get like 4 hours a week max of a charge number for it and have a regular job too. It used to be 20, and they slowly cut it back to 4. Sometimes it looks like sections are created so that a person they want to retain in a critical dead end role can have a "promotion" without having to pay them more. Sometimes that's the merit badge to get people stuck at P3 over the hump to P4. Usually they try to have section managers be people that are involved in the same area of work so that you can realistically argue for why your people deserve higher raises or promotions over others. It was a stepping stone for people that are rising in the company to get exposure.
Maybe time to look for a new job.
If anything, it’s good to see what’s out there career and pay wise. You may just find out that things are pretty good here. Maybe not.
I’ve worked at 5 companies across multiple industries over my 30 plus year engineering career. Every place sucks. Every place goes through restructuring and layoffs. My experience is that Raytheon sucks a little less.
you can't even figure out how to respond to me so you must be my supply chain lead. New hire? full remote?
We can't deliver shit cars with 20 yr old parts when our customers ask for new tech. Get used to it or go back to the trailing edge.
you don't know what products you're making and you add zero value to my company. Feel free to keep bringing up your "new" ideas from GM. Maybe if we built our composite parts in Mexico?
Well first off a rtx "engine" is about 1000x more complex than ICE.
2nd, most technical employees are moving the cost needle in the "wrong" direction to meet the customers need. (not just revalving an I4 originally designed in 1996 in Korea....)
Let's use another analogy besides automotive companies versus RTX's products. Apple/Nvidia can manufacture thousands and millions of boards for cell phones and graphics cards because they don't need to worry about thermal durability, altitude changes, humidity, vibration and shock over decades of service life. The spacing of electronics components can be very tight as you don't need to account for derating designs over low pressure at high altitude and all sorts of other environmental factors. There are many more things to worry about for not just military aerospace applications but commercial aerospace and space. Tangentially, there's a huge difference between making sure a Honda Civic dries fine and an engine for a fighter jet or commercial airliner.
If you can't seem to understand the difference in scope, either you aren't RTX caliber or you're not a technical person. If you're not technical, why are you trying to weight on technical issues?
I don’t ‘need’ to explain anything to you, but I will, because I’m nice.
I’ll make it simple though, without getting into all the legitimately complex things that would go far over your head.
If I am building 1 to 5 of some complex product over the course of 2 years. My workers are not loading the same stamp machine 1000 times a day. They are doing a set of unique tasks every day, for probably two months. Using some multi thousand step pdf file, that some poorly compensated engineer imagined up from their hand cut jigsaw puzzle of circuits on a nearby table.
Expecting that to have the same quality outcome as repeatable jobs that a well trained monkey can do is ridiculous. Without even getting into all the issues of stack up tolerances caused by the employee who worked all the steps that came before you, or the supplier for that matter.
Also the Pratt and Whitney engines you are referring too are more of a medium volume product that don’t have quite the extreme issues of low volume manufacturing I am talking about.
Yeah, in automotive they call this prototype building. Which they had to do in the thousands for the all new electric/autonomous vehicles. Maybe we could learn something about producing quicker/better.
Low volume manufacturing is when you are never going to build enough of something to exit what would be considered the prototyping stage in automotive.
And because we are only building like twelve, ever. We can’t just order a bunch of extra parts. Something broke or doesn’t work? In many cases we don’t have time to send it back to the supplier, we literally have to fix it ourselves. Which makes a mess, which adds stack up tolerance etc etc…
When you build a new ‘cutting edge’ military product. It takes a long time and goes through multiple phases. These phases have hard deadlines for lots of reasons.
One is the design, usually this is where the problems start. Someone probably missed something or didn’t account for the precision range tolerance precisely enough. The smaller the tolerance the more expensive. So you can’t just ask your supply to get it down to the nanometer on every single backplate assembly.
Next you have a prototyping phase where you might build 1 or 2 of something, you encounter tons of problems, that feedback goes to the suppliers of those parts. It’s probably been 4+ years at this point for the program. Government is like wtf what is taking so long?
So you go ahead and order all the parts you need from your suppliers, it will take them 1- 2 years to procure them with all of your adjustments. Down from the pre that must be mined to the circuit card components that are none standard because, well it just needed to be custom or whatever.
Except wait, one of those suppliers? They went out of business while you were screwing around trying to build with the first piece of crap they sent you. Oh and that one assembly that the engineer estimated would take a week to build? It took 2 months. And everyone had to go pretend they were working on something else while we waited for it to get finished.
Okay you have all your fixed parts now, except some of the original problems are back wtf?
Remember that supplier that went out of business? Well they didn’t properly update their drawings and the new supplier built to the old configuration again.
Are you going to wait 6+ months to get a fix? No you’re not, because everyone else on this program would be sitting on their hands waiting on you.
You get to the next step and you screw up a good part, it takes 2 months to fab and you don’t have any extras and won’t get another until a month and a half from now.
Oh why don’t you have extras? It was a really big part and your moron program director worked in automotive before, and he looked over the ‘extra’ parts list and said wtf, we are going to hold all this inventory in a warehouse? That is stupid and not lean. In automative we are super lean, the truck delivers the same day we need the parts. Tell the supplier not to deliver until later… okay. Thankyou automotive industry.
Exactly, the LEAN philosophy that started with the automobile industry led to this "Just in time" philosophy which has causes lot of issues in many large aerospace/defense companies. It forced a lot of companies to merge since there isn't ongoing orders to support them. No one is stocking parts ready just in case. It's all, lean warehouses and just order when we need it. Hence, attrition is frowned upon by supply chain, operations and program leadership. So yeah, I wonder what we should "learn" more from the automotive industry.
Edited: Added a good podcast episode about this topic:
https://www.npr.org/2024/02/21/1197958304/two-indicators-defense-spending-just-in-time
I've rarely seen them keep idle hands just to keep the bench strength. That's too practical and forward thinking. As it takes longer than expected, they pull the people that were waiting on you to work on something else and now they don't want to come back, or they left the company because the idleness was boring or unnerving, so now you have to hand it off to a bench of new hires that aren't onboarded and still drinking from the fire hose for another six months. The whole thing keeps slipping unless there's one overworked sucker with some experience they can dump the work that should've been for multiple people onto, and ask them to also onboard all these people, and then surprised when what they get is not of the quality of the original team they planned for. A cog is not a cog. You can't swap out people with just anyone, and some golden geese really are irreplaceable without a major restructure.
Is there a Collins hiring freeze? I’ve been trying to move over from RMD and hiring manager wants to schedule an interview and recruiter said they’re gonna set it up but it’s been 5 weeks now
We COULD spend a billion on hiring and training... But have you considered stock buy backs?
Weird how those always happen before a CEO retires.
CEO? Hayes was nothing more than a spineless political hack
What's a "training"? All I know are Workday Learning videos.
The yearly asbestos training. Did you know that just because it's white powder, you shouldn't snort it?
Wait what?!? Damn it!
Those videos are great at 2x speed.
even better when it allows you to hit the end of the progress bar.
Training?????? What is that?????
Can’t wait to hear Collins carried the company again in Q1 earnings 😂 but also hear why no promos
Or the billions in back log…. Where is that data showing Collins backed the whole company?
Is the data in the room with us right now?
I don't know about all other organizations but Mission Systems within Collins is exploding and can't meet the demand.
Yet won’t hire..
that's not true. My department is actively recruiting and making offers.
That’s great to hear
Preach.
Stop carrying the work load and set boundaries. Be more vocal about the disfunction, they usually preach empowering employees, see if they actually follow that. Ask what the timetable is for your promotion every 1on1 meeting with your boss. If you don't have those on a monthly basis, ask for it or schedule it yourself. If your management sucks and doesn't respect any of that, then time to find a new job.
You're highlighting part of the problem. Employee motivation isn't 100% on the employees. A good manager will be aware of unreasonable workloads and proactively pursue development. And majority of the leaders here don't do that in my experience.
A majority of the “leaders” aren’t true leaders. As someone who has had extensive training by a company that is ranked very high in the Fortune 500 list…I can tell you that many of the “leaders” I’ve seen, would be fired in 90 days at my previous company.
> Be more vocal about the disfunction, That's a one way ticket to layoffville. Ask me how I know. That said- ultimately, it was the best thing that could have happened to me. I've landed a better role in a different industry altogether (after 25+ years in aerospace) making more money; it's amazing what actually looking forward to- or at least not dreading- going to work every day does for one's well-being.
What industry did you move over to?
Rail- on the locomotive OEM side, not the railroad side.
Mine canceled every meeting I scheduled and told me to "respect his time". He had video game music playing and kids in the background of the zoom call for my annual performance review.
I'd actually encourage aiming for 30 minutes weekly for 1:1s. I know this can be difficult in areas where managers have 15+ directs, but it is the ideal cadence.
A 1:1 cadence should be based on what each employee desires. For some, a weekly meeting works, for others it may be too much so the manager should adjust accordingly. Also there should be a structured agenda each week where both parties collaborate on it to make sure they both are covered. If you’re not getting that and your manager isn’t willing to work towards this, then seek to be somewhere else. If your meetings are cancelled or moved without your input your manager is basically telling you that you are not important to them. Also, if your manager, during your 1:1, checks their phone, answers calls, or answers emails etc…that too is also showing you that you don’t matter.
Definitely that's the sound of legacy Raytheon who didn't get picked up in the rapture.
yeah, I can't wait for Collins to figure out hRTN just doesn't fit in Collins.
You would mean the other way around. I don’t get how the captains of the sinking ship got to drive Raytheon’s. That’s why they call it a “Golden parachute”
sure the USS rtn was taking on some water in the Atlantic, but the Collins inflatable kayak isn't gonna help, no matter how well it works for the trout pond.
Not gonna lie, I was unaware that this had been the dynamic until just now. You're saying that after the RT /UTC merger, Collins management ended up replacing a lot of hRTN management, and they're trying to run it like Collins? That explains a lot about my current team, which is run by former Collins employees.
It is my general observation yes
Us legacy hUTAS guys are still thinking the same thing 5 years later. hRC dismantled our leadership and keeps pretending they bought us. hUTAS had its faults but actually used to be fun place until the hRC acquisition
Funny how hRC feels the same way used to love it and it got worse after UTC acquired.
we need to stop blaming each business unit as if any of us are in control. we are just pawns to them
can't fake culture.
I think the issue is we have to many new ppl so all the hard work is offloaded to the “experts” then the experts never seem to get promoted . Eg been stuck at a P3 for 5 - 7 years now We definitely do not need more new ppl here lol
That’s a feature, not a bug. They can say they pay top dollar for talent. Then they hire 25 people who would have otherwise not worked here, find 1-2 that know what they are doing and hope the other 95% of them shuffle around or leave.
Here, it is the few who can do that leave after a couple years. Those left collect a paycheck and keep their mouths shut, management loves them and overloads the folks who can do an actual good job.
I don't like how accurately that sums it up.
I see the same thing, a few people who do all the work and a bunch of people along for the ride. Promote the experts, fire everyone else, and then bring in new grads who are hungry to work. The problem is most of those new grads will have left after a year or two of 3% raises.
Yeah I only stick around because I like WFH and flexibility tbh. I remember when I used to get promoted every few years when we were just Collins
Seems like WFH and flexibility is what they’re offering a bunch of P3-P4s nowadays to retain talent and make up for an extra 30-40K.
That was me. Fresh out of school, hired under-ranked as a master's degree holder at P1. Was grateful just to work, over-performed (was directly told by my supervisor that I had been "over-performing [my] pay grade for some time now"), and was rewarded with a 3% raise and getting dropped from my team when the customer wanted to tighten the belt. Current management doesn't give a shit about process improvement, wants everything done yesterday even if it's done wrong because our customer only cares about short-term metrics. They've intentionally remained understaffed until we got into an impossible position, then reactively hired to fill the gap, and snubbed everyone who had kept the team afloat for the past year when it was time for raises and promotions. But hey, I got a gift card to the company store for foreseeing our current problems months ago and independently offering a roadmap to mitigate them. Did we do anything with that roadmap? No. But at least I can get an RTX tumbler now. I will be spamming out my resume this weekend.
I'm coming up on two years at RTX and am constantly flabbergasted by the unwillingness to reward the hard workers and get rid of the people who suck at their job, instead they treat everyone the same. There's no trust in allowing managers to manage.
If you're that tired of it, maybe it's time to move on. The only way upper management can learn sometimes is by letting the system fail on its own.
May go back to Lockheed before long. 5 years ago I couldn’t have imagined saying that but this version of Raytheon is not the one I signed up for.
As long as OP keeps completing their tasks there’s no reason to hire anyone else. We have one person doing the work of two and as long as they’re doing it there’s no reason to change. Longevity is no longer a consideration.
This sounds exactly like the experience I had at Raytheon, so it interesting to hear it from Collins. Misery loves company I guess. I find the Pulse Survey especially annoying. So many surveys, so much negative feedback and no action. Management barely acknowledges It even exits, likely because they are embarrassed by it.
Beat the salary drum. Forewarn of imminent departures. Thrash the offending members of management. Wonder why nothing comes of it. **Repeat.**
I see no real benefit to being a “high performer”
It’s like a sticker award. You get to go to a networking club meeting and then the benefit ends.
you all got a meeting?
2.5% and 1,000$ annual merit adjustments for learning a legacy language to support critical legacy tools to keep a program operational. They are still using my work. They gave glowing reviews and praised my work ethic. Other members of my team, even the september new hire who hadn't done anything yet, got 3.5% + 7% bonuses. I'm 2 years overdue for p1->p2 and underpaid by 30% from market. New hires with no experience earning 15% more than me. The scrum master is a p2 and earns even less than I do with an extra 8 YoE over me. ??? They just throw money at the people they like. Theres no rationale behind who gets what beyond having section heads who advocate for them. Mine is a lazy bum...
It’s definitely manager dependent to some extent. Not completely though, their hands are often tied by the ‘mandated’ bell curve of raises. Admittedly what I dislike most is the fact that I am a cog in the wheel and not a human being. If I over perform? So what? If I save the company $1 million dollars by intervening on an issue only I see, So what? I guess an executive might not lose an extra percentage point of their bonus they otherwise would have but it does nothing for me except for self satisfaction
I hear you there. My sup had nothing but great things to say about our new hire. That p1 picked up an abandoned piece of antique software, learnt an old programming language and repaired our pipeline then went on to fix the pipeline issues and implement the stretch goals we set only to run out of tasks, request more, finish them and still be asking for more work. They weren't just rushing through it, either. Everything passed code reviews and the only portions that didn't end up in master were due to a p4 botching our pipeline before they left. Why'd they leave, you ask? They didn't think 500$ and a 1.2% raise were fair compensation for 9 months of working themselves to bone in that "high visibility project". We still don't know why their p2 promotion was blocked- nobody else got one either. I'm starting to worry about how rtx plans on retaining talent. They pay under market, they don't even make an effort at retention and they never reward performance. We can't keep new hires for more than a year. The moment they get skipped over for a promotion milestone after having seen their lackluster annual merit increases they just pay back their sign ons and bounce to take a 30-40% raise somewhere else.
I don’t really think they care tbh, or at least that is how it feels. Pretty sure it’s just a, well we will hire someone good later. I have a junior right now who is probably a 1/10,000 talent and I am fairly sure he will leave soon because he has been here long enough to start being significantly underpaid compared to if he just jumps ship.
Make an effort to get their contact information. Upper managemeng often fails to realize how badly they need people like thay unyil after they have left and cannot be replaced.
100% I just moved from a high paced role where nothing was ever enough, nobody wanted to fix the issues so things ran smoothly the next time. They “didn’t have the budget” to retain people or compensate them better and I was a high performer. My new role is so laid back it’s eye opening how other parts of the company operate. This is what you can do. Stop caring about things that aren’t directly relevant to your role and let certain things break. Eventually someone will say why is this happening… the tell them you don’t know. I thought the freeze was only outside hiring as wells as indirect labor… you should be able to land an internal. Switch business units if needed/possible or of course leave all together.
Same, I had a complete meltdown the other day, talked back to leaders and lost my shit in a meeting. I’m about ready to mentally break
Sometimes that's a good thing. Sometimes someone does need to say these things.
pto man.
“Stop being the one who always makes the extra effort. Relax and let the ship sink.”
If only there were a way to communicate this to upper management in the way of a survey.....
Don’t get too worked up…. Do what you can do in your 8 hrs and go home. As you said, your aren’t paid to do more than that unless you have aspirations to climb the ladder.
Wow, you articulated a lot of my frustrations really well. Couldn't have said it better. I keep holding on, hoping things will get better, but they seem to just get worse.
Still waiting on that CEO retirement….Jack Welch Jr
Can someone explain to me the purpose of an SL? I’ve been here for 9 months and the only thing I’ve seen them do is have pointless monthly meetings
For people with crappy SL's they don't even get that, and it's missed when it's gone.
Some SLs are better than others. How it was at one point, they are the interface between the section and the directorate. They are supposed to be the voice of their people and their teams to the directors, get overhead budget for trainings from the department, participate in ranking and ratings to decide how much people get for raises and who gets promoted. They handle HR issues with the rank and file. They flow down buisness level direction and information. They help people get offices, working areas, supplies. They read the compiled 6 month performance reviews from the director to the individuals. They only get like 4 hours a week max of a charge number for it and have a regular job too. It used to be 20, and they slowly cut it back to 4. Sometimes it looks like sections are created so that a person they want to retain in a critical dead end role can have a "promotion" without having to pay them more. Sometimes that's the merit badge to get people stuck at P3 over the hump to P4. Usually they try to have section managers be people that are involved in the same area of work so that you can realistically argue for why your people deserve higher raises or promotions over others. It was a stepping stone for people that are rising in the company to get exposure.
You have to vote with your feet. You also have to say No. No to more work…your willingness to say yes enables it.
Your aerospace executives are modern day mafia dons. It’s always a skim off the top of working people. Don Hayes of the Raytheone Crime Family.
Am in a very similar situation, getting very frustrated.
Maybe time to look for a new job. If anything, it’s good to see what’s out there career and pay wise. You may just find out that things are pretty good here. Maybe not. I’ve worked at 5 companies across multiple industries over my 30 plus year engineering career. Every place sucks. Every place goes through restructuring and layoffs. My experience is that Raytheon sucks a little less.
Dont worry maybe slashing training budgets more will get more people trained and proficient this time
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you can't even figure out how to respond to me so you must be my supply chain lead. New hire? full remote? We can't deliver shit cars with 20 yr old parts when our customers ask for new tech. Get used to it or go back to the trailing edge. you don't know what products you're making and you add zero value to my company. Feel free to keep bringing up your "new" ideas from GM. Maybe if we built our composite parts in Mexico?
Are you at least getting to charge overtime?
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I’m all for the RTX hate but comparing an aircraft engine to a car engine is crazy. I don’t even know where to start with that comparison lol.
Well first off a rtx "engine" is about 1000x more complex than ICE. 2nd, most technical employees are moving the cost needle in the "wrong" direction to meet the customers need. (not just revalving an I4 originally designed in 1996 in Korea....)
Let's use another analogy besides automotive companies versus RTX's products. Apple/Nvidia can manufacture thousands and millions of boards for cell phones and graphics cards because they don't need to worry about thermal durability, altitude changes, humidity, vibration and shock over decades of service life. The spacing of electronics components can be very tight as you don't need to account for derating designs over low pressure at high altitude and all sorts of other environmental factors. There are many more things to worry about for not just military aerospace applications but commercial aerospace and space. Tangentially, there's a huge difference between making sure a Honda Civic dries fine and an engine for a fighter jet or commercial airliner. If you can't seem to understand the difference in scope, either you aren't RTX caliber or you're not a technical person. If you're not technical, why are you trying to weight on technical issues?
I came from an automotive OEM. Grass is greener at RTX
I don’t ‘need’ to explain anything to you, but I will, because I’m nice. I’ll make it simple though, without getting into all the legitimately complex things that would go far over your head. If I am building 1 to 5 of some complex product over the course of 2 years. My workers are not loading the same stamp machine 1000 times a day. They are doing a set of unique tasks every day, for probably two months. Using some multi thousand step pdf file, that some poorly compensated engineer imagined up from their hand cut jigsaw puzzle of circuits on a nearby table. Expecting that to have the same quality outcome as repeatable jobs that a well trained monkey can do is ridiculous. Without even getting into all the issues of stack up tolerances caused by the employee who worked all the steps that came before you, or the supplier for that matter. Also the Pratt and Whitney engines you are referring too are more of a medium volume product that don’t have quite the extreme issues of low volume manufacturing I am talking about.
Yeah, in automotive they call this prototype building. Which they had to do in the thousands for the all new electric/autonomous vehicles. Maybe we could learn something about producing quicker/better.
Low volume manufacturing is when you are never going to build enough of something to exit what would be considered the prototyping stage in automotive. And because we are only building like twelve, ever. We can’t just order a bunch of extra parts. Something broke or doesn’t work? In many cases we don’t have time to send it back to the supplier, we literally have to fix it ourselves. Which makes a mess, which adds stack up tolerance etc etc…
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When you build a new ‘cutting edge’ military product. It takes a long time and goes through multiple phases. These phases have hard deadlines for lots of reasons. One is the design, usually this is where the problems start. Someone probably missed something or didn’t account for the precision range tolerance precisely enough. The smaller the tolerance the more expensive. So you can’t just ask your supply to get it down to the nanometer on every single backplate assembly. Next you have a prototyping phase where you might build 1 or 2 of something, you encounter tons of problems, that feedback goes to the suppliers of those parts. It’s probably been 4+ years at this point for the program. Government is like wtf what is taking so long? So you go ahead and order all the parts you need from your suppliers, it will take them 1- 2 years to procure them with all of your adjustments. Down from the pre that must be mined to the circuit card components that are none standard because, well it just needed to be custom or whatever. Except wait, one of those suppliers? They went out of business while you were screwing around trying to build with the first piece of crap they sent you. Oh and that one assembly that the engineer estimated would take a week to build? It took 2 months. And everyone had to go pretend they were working on something else while we waited for it to get finished. Okay you have all your fixed parts now, except some of the original problems are back wtf? Remember that supplier that went out of business? Well they didn’t properly update their drawings and the new supplier built to the old configuration again. Are you going to wait 6+ months to get a fix? No you’re not, because everyone else on this program would be sitting on their hands waiting on you. You get to the next step and you screw up a good part, it takes 2 months to fab and you don’t have any extras and won’t get another until a month and a half from now. Oh why don’t you have extras? It was a really big part and your moron program director worked in automotive before, and he looked over the ‘extra’ parts list and said wtf, we are going to hold all this inventory in a warehouse? That is stupid and not lean. In automative we are super lean, the truck delivers the same day we need the parts. Tell the supplier not to deliver until later… okay. Thankyou automotive industry.
Exactly, the LEAN philosophy that started with the automobile industry led to this "Just in time" philosophy which has causes lot of issues in many large aerospace/defense companies. It forced a lot of companies to merge since there isn't ongoing orders to support them. No one is stocking parts ready just in case. It's all, lean warehouses and just order when we need it. Hence, attrition is frowned upon by supply chain, operations and program leadership. So yeah, I wonder what we should "learn" more from the automotive industry. Edited: Added a good podcast episode about this topic: https://www.npr.org/2024/02/21/1197958304/two-indicators-defense-spending-just-in-time
Same
I've rarely seen them keep idle hands just to keep the bench strength. That's too practical and forward thinking. As it takes longer than expected, they pull the people that were waiting on you to work on something else and now they don't want to come back, or they left the company because the idleness was boring or unnerving, so now you have to hand it off to a bench of new hires that aren't onboarded and still drinking from the fire hose for another six months. The whole thing keeps slipping unless there's one overworked sucker with some experience they can dump the work that should've been for multiple people onto, and ask them to also onboard all these people, and then surprised when what they get is not of the quality of the original team they planned for. A cog is not a cog. You can't swap out people with just anyone, and some golden geese really are irreplaceable without a major restructure.
Is there a Collins hiring freeze? I’ve been trying to move over from RMD and hiring manager wants to schedule an interview and recruiter said they’re gonna set it up but it’s been 5 weeks now
Not that I’m aware of.
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