When Everything is Top Priority, Nothing Is - werkgeversreview Proposal Analyst bij RTX

1,0
28 jun 2021
Aanbevelen
Goedkeuring directeur
Zakelijk vooruitzicht

Pluspunten

Employee benefits (healthcare sucks, dental is pretty iffy too, but 9/80 schedule, education program, and retirement matching is nice. Also it's not advertised clearly and hard to find, but they have a deal through ComPsych for 8 free therapy sessions per year which many of us have had to use). Big name company so after a couple years you can apply elsewhere. Before starting, I knew three people who used to work at RTX. Two were older people who were fired right before they started really reaping the benefits of their long-term service (which is actually really common I'm hearing for "sudden layoffs" so RTX doesn't need to pay employees for their service). The other quit because he hated it so much and told his female daughter he would not pay for her schooling if she worked at RTX later on because he hated how the company treated employees. Why is this in Pros? Because with a big name company, you can leverage the name to apply elsewhere. Old fashioned company where quantity of years of experience is valued greater than quality of experience and knowledge. Basically, I've known people who do the bare minimum and so long as they wait two years at each level of position, they'll move up. If you want to coast by and move up regardless, this can be beneficial. Pay is standard. I know a lot of people who are complaining about being underpayed, and they by no means pay a lot, but it's enough for me to share a one-bedroom apartment with only one roommate for an entry-level job. Got my first salary raise after one year (was told to expect 3%, got 3%, which was less than inflation in my area). Still, could be worse. I definitely would prefer to have my own place, and have it not be in the worst part of town. I also recently found out that I am close to the bottom quarterile of pay range for a P1 despite my crazy hours and hard work and when I tried to speak to HR about pay after receiving the offer letter was firmly told the whole offer was non-negotiable. I guess the Pro is that I'm able to pay for food and half of rent in my area. I'm sure it's a case-by-case basis, but I really like my team and manager. My manager really has my back and in some nasty emails has stepped up for me. Also they've been helping me look for other employment. My coworkers are willing to help as needed to get proposals out and so if one of us is sick, we're willing to assist while the other recovers.

Minpunten

Company culture. On my first day there was a team meeting that quickly erupted into yelling. My manager called me afterwards to say "well, that's engineering" and try to laugh it off. I've never been a particularly angry person, but I've gotten into the really bad habit of hitting my desk when I get angry now (mostly from tech issues, because the RTX VPN and laptops they give out are absolutely terrible). The culture rubs off on you and it's really hard not to let it. As the title says, everything is constantly top priority. Because of this, no one knows what to actually focus their efforts on so nothing gets done. I don't know if we've had a single proposal on time my entire time working for the company. Because of this, Program Managers will try to make deadlines earlier to give more wiggle room but those are unrealistic so they get missed too. Estimators will complain to us (proposal analysts) and all we can really do is say "yeah this is really unreasonable, by the way where are X, Y, and Z, because the program manager keeps messaging me every 30 minutes asking for it". Terribly understaffed to get anything done. Management doesn't care. They have these "Finance Town Hall" meetings, where they explain the current state of the company and have RTX finance employees submit questions to management. At the last one, underpayment, lack of raises and promotions, mental health issues, and understaffing got brought up in separate questions. The Management's response for nearly every question was 'we are competitive for our industry' and 'this really isn't an issue'. It was extremely disheartening to have all of our concerns brushed aside so casually, but I guess that's par for the course. You're working well past your 40 hour weeks. One of the benefits of being salary for most places is although you don't get overtime, you might run a little low on work some days and get to head out early if there's nothing really needed. The trade off of course is that if there's a lot to be done, you might finish late and work past the 40 hr week. At RTX though, the timecard is set up so you're at minimum working 40 hours every week, and unable to list more than 40 hours even if you worked it. At the end of every workday, you have to log in to the timecard and list everything you worked on that day down to the sixth minute (so 6 minutes would be 0.1). The kicker is, any time not spent working on a proposal (so checking emails, attending meetings, mandatory training sessions), must be charged to overhead. When your raise and bonus are calculated at the end of the year, if you have high overhead you will be penalized. So if you want your meager 3% raise, you have to not only work a minimum of the 40 hours (and the extra 20 minutes each day figuring out what you spent your time on), but also try to work past whatever you did during those 8 hours that was charged to overhead so you can instead charge the time to a proposal. Mind you, this is monitored extremely closely and we commonly get aggressive emails saying "you charged 0.2 of an hour on this proposal last week. Explain what you did and CC who authorized your work". My SO keeps saying I should go to the labor board about it because I'm consistently working crazy hours and getting upset calls and messages asking for things to get done, but RTX is clever and because it's not "really" mandatory for you to do anything, it just doesn't seem worth trying anything and sullying my name. I know how it might sound, but I'm really a hard worker and I believe in putting my all in my work. It's just disheartening and continually met with angry responses about it not being enough. Also, you're working with RTX groups across the nation and in different timezones. Don't hold your breath for them to think about what time it's by you. I started having to put my phone in "do not disturb" so I would stop getting calls at 4 in the morning, or late at night. If people feel so inclined to work at midnight (which happens far too often), it might be helpful to know not everyone else is. Also, you get the standard PTO package (2 wk vacation, 1 wk sick). You can only carry over 40 hrs per year though, and it does not get paid out - basically if you don't use it, it disappears. Unfortunately, this seems to happen for almost everyone I've seen at the company, including myself. During down time, my manager has recommended that we use PTO if we want to leave early in a day (even if the day before you worked 12 hours). So your "vacation time" is really not vacation. Continual mass exodus. Employees aren't happy and it shows. They have employee satisfaction surveys before our all hands meetings and for some reason they never show the results. About two months into me working at my position, a coworker asked dejectedly at a small meeting if there was any room for advancement in the near future. After being told no by our manager, he left that month. People are leaving left and right, and we aren't able to hold on to new people. We keep trying to hire for new positions, and the applicants either deny the offer, we get told overhead is too high and we have to freeze hiring, or the new hires leave right away. The thing is, no one blames them. It's become a celebration when people get to leave, and we send congratulatory messages and write recommendations. I've told numerous coworkers I'd happily be a reference for them, because people are working incredibly hard but not being met with benefits for it. Technology is terrible and outdated. For a company with "Technologies" written in the title, you'd think (or hope) that you might not be forced to use Internet Explorer for 90% of the work. You'd be wrong though. We're all stuck on Internet Explorer, using a VPN that crashes every hour when the internet gets just a bit too slow, having Excel files fail to load and crash the whole laptop, etc. It's my biggest and most common frustration. Yes, I asked and got my RAM upgraded. The effect has seemed to be minimal. They have us on i5-8350Us and it's enough to make my SO laugh when they go over its specs. Also, many of the older employees are very tech-unsavvy and for one reason or another it has been falling on us proposal analysts to be their IT support. I had to screenshare with an engineer and show him how to COPY AND PASTE. The issue is, promotions are based on time rather than skill. He's been here forever and never needed to do it himself. People get so. lazy. As a proposal analyst you review basis of estimates. The amount of time I have spent opening a BOE to have it say "error code XXXX" submitted for approval because they didn't bother to proofread it, or have it be coherent until the last step where it says "5 hours per month * 10 months = 742 hours" so it lines up with their estimate and they don't need to revise drives me crazy. But for so many people, why would they put in effort to have it constantly be asked why A and not A+ when allowance is anything above a C. Incredibly frustrating work environment. I mean, I've worked fast food, labor, retail, internships, etc. and never really complained. This is just a terrible company to work for in my experience. I really didn't want to write a review, but my SO convinced me that this is the right thing to do, to help warn anyone hoping on making a long term career here. Some people thrive in this type of environment, I'm just not one of them.

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Minpunten

Het kan moeilijk zijn om bij zo'n groot aannemersbedrijf voor defensie te werken vanwege alle processen en administratieve rompslomp. Dingen kunnen langzaam gaan, je moet geduld hebben en je strijd kiezen. Dat gezegd hebbende, als je leert hoe je binnen het systeem moet werken, kun je hier een aanzienlijke impact maken!

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