Re:Lockheed Martin is an inferior company (Score 0)

O RLY? I'm with you until the part about not believing that this kind of nonsense is going on. Ever hear of ACS? It was the biggest Lockmart program aside from Deepwater that the company gave any publicity to in the past two years. It was just canned a little while ago. Why? Because LM built a plane that couldn't fly due to the excessive weight requirements. Their people knew it, warned about it, and yet executive management kept saying that all was well to the rest of the program and the customer. I am willing to bet that there was a customer acceptance of the risk, or a planned fix during the next spiral of development. That program is far too much of a public face for Lockheed to let something that simple go for long. That said, I can easily see where his frustrations with the company itself led to this (there is still not enough info on what happened to make a stong opinion IMHO). To say that the company is outmoded would be an understatement. Most of this guys complaints would have to go through his functional chain... which do not work on the program (and are often referred to as "short bus management" due to their incompetence). Not to be confused with program management, functional management are a group of managers... most of whom no project in their right mind would ever hire for a position. So what do these managers with little technical skill or comprehension do? Oh... just the little stuff, like control your salary, all of your promotions (you can't even get promoted or move to a new position without a program bending over for the demands of functional management), taking your complains if there is an issue or whistleblower event or an ethics issue. You know the "non-critical" aspect of your career. I mean, according to their own public documents, you can't even get a pager through them without having an executive VP review and sign-off on it. Instead of doing their jobs, you have an executive being paid 1M or more doing the work of an admin, just so they can put a tighter control on things. We had a term for that when I was in school... micromanagement These are also the guys who managed to be singled out for the mind shattering levels of employee loss that the company is currently enjoying (45% in some facilities, 90%+ in some departments alone). I don't mean retiring, employee deaths, transfers, or the like. I mean, flat out leaving the company. It was bad enough that they had to publically admit that they are having "attrition workshops" (has a nice ring, eh?) to deal with the problem. While we don't actually know for certain what has happened, I can probably make a fair guess that this guy was frustrated by the bureaucracy of the company. When your needs and concerns for every aspect of your job is in the hands of people you wouldn't hire as retail cashiers, it doesn't take much to push someone towards an action like this. Due to the contract requirements, the customer probably wasn't even allowed to talk with him and had to deal with the functional management. So you have a less than competent, non-technical person trying to relay to a customer rep a technical issue. Considering all the factors, I can easily see the frustration that this person had with the company.