What is it like? Recently heard about a company called Sandia National Laboratories which I think works with nukes!!! How’s gov jobs?
Not necessarily nukes - SNL also does less interesting work with DHS etc. Gov doesn’t pay as we all know; benefits are decent; great work WLB; not really a lot of pressure to perform - especially after the 1 year probationary period. Almost impossible to get fired - you have to really suck and even than it can take a while. You get to bully contractors - who do all the work. Most SWEs end up maintaining or O&M work as all the “cool” work is done under gov contracts by big 4 and other consulting companies.
Do not come to Sandia or any government job if you want high TC. Sandia requires high degree (until very recently the minimum was a Master's to get a non-grunt engineering job) and the pay is garbage. I have Master's in EE and 3yoe on top and my TC is 115k. It's shit and I'm going to be leaving this year for silicon valley. Government does not take local markets into account so I'm being paid the same as the fucking loser idiots in New Mexico (where headquarters are) when I'm living in bay area. I plan to come back to Sandia when I'm much older and just wanna come in to work and collect a paycheck, since the workload you do here is basically non existant if you get into the right group (most of them), unfortunately I got unlucky and actually have work to do a lot of time. The flip side is if you're willing to work at the NM headquarters there's a ton of different types do work (nuclear components, missile systems, robotics, machine learning, novel physics) and you can usually find a way to do that work for a group, but then you have to live in Albuquerque, New Mexico where your next door neighbor is definitely a meth addict and pizzas are thrown on roofs on a regular occasion. Do not come here. I beg you. For your TCs sake.
Also lots of minor things that are SUPER annoying: -cant talk about my work work my friends/family/GF because it's all classified -cant bring my phone into where I work as it's extremely restricted access -cant access personal emails at work for security reasons Working on highly classified shit is so much more of a hassle than the "cool factor" which wears off within months
Does TC go up once you have clearance?
Been getting a lot of targeted ads for NSA careers
They pay crap but have good pensions. Basically you are a lifer if you want a decent payout
Nope, no pensions any more!