Inside SAIC

An anonymous reader submits this profile of SAIC, Science Applications International Corporation, the behemoth defense contractor/research outfit/spymaster.

Comments

This is what people need to be reading

[Blaine Hilton]

If people are not paranoid about governments watching everything and placing every tidbit of information in huge underground databases then this is the article that will open eyes.

I for one have never heard of this company before today and I'm pretty shocked. I've been pretty vocal about worries on TIA issues, but geeze...

On the other hand perhaps it was better "before" when we the people didn't know about everything and just believed blindly in our government to protect us.

What does being listed have to do with secrecy?

[WIAKywbfatw]

This is one company that i certainly hope never IPO's...imagine taking decisions about secret technologies to the stock holders...

What, like these companies?

Boeing
Lockheed Martin
United Technologies

Being listed on the stock exchange hasn't lead to these companies (and many others like them) being denied defense contracts or them leaking military secrets so why should you expect that to be a problem for SAIC?

Re:SAIC is Employee-Owned - Employee-Ownership Roc

[cje]

The interesting point about SAIC is the "private market" for company shares that the company itself maintains. How well does that really work for employees who don't want to have a disproportionate share of their savings tied to their company's stock?

Well, for one thing, the 401(K) plan gives you a list of mutual funds/bonds/etc. of varying degree of risk to invest in, pretty much the same as any typical 401(K). You don't need to invest in SAIC if you don't want to (although you certainly can.) SAIC's company match is given in the form of SAIC stock, but that is hardly unusual.

SAIC gives its employees lots of chances to buy company stock (and stock options), and it gives out things like stock options and fully-vested shares as performance bonuses, but nobody is required to invest their retirement savings in it. If somebody's got 100% of their retirement funds in SAIC stock, that's because that's the way they wanted it.

Re:employment and advancement

[pmz]

I don't know about the rest of you, but I've met a ton of people with great credentials who are morons and many non-degreed and non-certified people who are excellent people to work and deal with.

Large corporations are machines. If you don't exist on paper, you don't exist at all.

In all seriousness, if you were an HR person with thousands of employees to track, how would you track them? Get to know them around a campfire singing camp songs or, perhaps more conveniently, a datastore holding all your worthwhile attributes? If it isn't in the data model, it
can't be worthwhile, can it?