BAE Systems reviews

* The remuneration is well behind market rate, especially when considering specific and niche skills. As a consequence it is near impossible to recruit for some roles and graduates are used to fill the gap. BAE thus acts as an incubator for other organisations by bringing graduates, spending a lot of time and effort training them, and watching them walk away for a 40% uptick in salary after 2 years. * Performance Management is atrocious. There is an annual review that is rushed (because it aligns with year end and Christmas). This is simplistic, and then fed into the void, where three months later a number comes out and you find out if you were promoted, what your salary increase is, and if you've got a bonus (spoiler alert: you probably haven't). * Senior Management have no presence, and communicate almost exclusively via 'blog posts' on the intranet. These are normally vacuous and contain no real content other than a "Thank you for working hard, please carry on". * If you aren't on a good project with good management, you can easily work 80+ hours a week indefinitely to try and keep a project afloat, for no thanks and no material impact on your annual review. * The company is attempting to transition to a products organisation rather than a consultancy. The emphasis is on being 'market-led', which would be fine, were it not for being taken literally by managers that don't understand their markets well enough to challenge what the customers say or identify a root issue. Thus they prescribe a solution that they want that excludes the opportunity to innovate and be 'market-leading', and also that when presented to end-users, doesn't meet the intended goals.

Such a high turnover problem. It's hard to find graduates that stay over the two year mark, and as a result, you're constantly having knowledge transfer sessions. This means that rather than going forward at full pace, you're constantly hindered by having to get someone else up to speed, making all the mistakes that were already ironed out by the last person who tried something.