There are certainly staff members at defense contractors who strive for excellence (I know several personally), but yeah the management culture is pretty fucked. Lots of cases where engineers point out what a bad idea something is, get overruled (because we have a deadline to meet, dammit), and then management acts shocked when it blows up in their faces.
replyVery surprised because I know several fellow alumni that went on to do extremely technical low level "frontier level" work there. Due to the secret nature of their operations, what they literally do day to day is an angle I don't know much about so maybe its all nonsense but I don't get that feeling.
replyDefense contractors, as a rule, seem to have a corporate culture of mediocrity and poor performance. But you will find pockets within them that do better, possibly even actually being "frontier level". IT projects, though, are not one of the things they tend to excel at. The FAA stuff as one example, but most IT procurements end up bogged down with years of delays or just failures. It's tradition now.
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