Pros
The people were great. The problems being solved were interesting. Immediate management felt like they cared. Benefits were nice. Comp time is an amazing system with a lot of flexibility.
Kontras
Small stuff: - Depending on your level of experience, you are underpaid, but this can be rather consistent for the entire area in regards to DoD contracted programmers. - Any learning you do that Dynetics offers is off the clock, including if it would help in your project(s). If it doesn't have a project number, you won't be paid for it. Big stuff: - (NOTE: this is before the full transition to a Leidos company) IT is your enemy in many situations. We have to consistently re-apply for our admin accounts *for our own machines*. Further, there have been some attempts from IT to remove our admin accounts as a whole. There was a story floating around about how IT broke every workflow for an entire department in JIRA and how one person from that department spent an entire week fixing it when IT wouldn't. - Don't expect remote work at all. Even during the worst of the worst points in Covid, upper management were trying to get everyone back into the offices until the president made the mandate about it. Even once the president made his mandate, they *still* tried to get around it, even though Leidos (the *PARENT COMPANY* at this point) had a mandate before it to do remote work/limit building access. - A lot of the longer-term people are probably gone by now. The most senior and probably most important programmer is leaving due to the Covid decisions that were made. There's a lot of history in the projects, and a lot of age and tech debt. There's a good chance that no one is left who knows about it. - There are anti-maskers and anti-vaxxers in the workplace. Take that as you will. All in all, my complaints point to things outside of the team I was a part of. With some exceptions, they were good people that I enjoyed working with and I would love to work with them again. I just could not stand the decisions of upper management nor having to fight with IT for things that I shouldn't have to fight with them about. Further, more and more people who had been there for a while, and were important, were leaving the company and it did not look good.