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Inside SAIC
An anonymous reader submits this profile of SAIC, Science Applications International Corporation, the behemoth defense contractor/research outfit/spymaster.
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I work for an employee-owned company that is modeled after SAIC, and it is pretty cool. You can clearly see that your work is contributing to the success of the company, which is driving the growth of the stock value, which is putting money in your pocket. And we attract a lot of top-notch people because of that.
If you didn't read too far into the article you might get the wrong impression, though. Twice on the first page they say that it's privately held, and it's only on the second page where employee ownership is discussed.
The "invisible company" angle of this article cracks me up. Seems like you can't swing a dead cat without hitting an SAIC employee. Everyone knows about them. They're everywhere. Finding a person who hadn't heard of SAIC would about as easy as finding someone who hasn't heard of Microsoft. But I guess that's just my world. Good article, tho.
BTW, if you are a java programmer in the DC area interested in doing defense work with a great company, send me your resume.
"I don't know half of you half as well as I should like, and I like less than half of you half as well as you deserve."
SAIC will always be a private company. FYI, they don't even allow people outside the company to own stock. While you work there you are awarded pieces of the company as part of your compensation (beats the hell outta options, IMO), but when you leave you're forced to liquidate all your holdings in the company. Given the extremely sensitive nature of their line of work I'll bet this policy will never change.
-A.M.
Pimpin' all the Karma Hoes!
I work for SAIC, and employee ownership is pretty kickass, and the long list of "cool shit" that we do keeps getting larger and larger. My favorite part by far is that since everyone is an owner, the "retard rate" is alot lower - that guy slacking off is costing you money, so everyone busts ass.
The company is VERY conservative, lots of ex-military folks, but even conservative companies understand saving money, so at our division Open Source reigns supreme.
At our office we use Redhat, Debian, PostgreSQL, Bugzilla, and CVS almost exclusively. We all have linux desktops and laptops, even though the "corporate standard" is Exchange. We can get away with this because SAIC acts more like a cluster of tiny companies rather than a monolith. As long as we remain profitable, we can really do almost what we want.
My boss donates space to the local LUG at night to hold meetings, because they recognize the value of fostering professional development, AND it gives them a nice steady hiring pool.
If you ever have a chance to interview for SAIC then do it.
SAIC is not secretive. It just doesn't a "Investor Relations" dept. whose job is to hype its name on Wall St. and CNBC.
SAIC _has_ bid against itself for government contracts (highly embarassing). This is because the company is very diversified and has little vertical control coordination. Each unit operates like a small business. They are responsible for their own profit/loss. I've known a unit a unit to sub-contract to another company, because they didn't know the capability was already in house.
Employee ownership:
All employees are equal, but some are more equal than others.
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...
You won't hear about most defense contractors. In truth, they are everywhere--a dime a dozen. Some small doing integration work, some immense building B-2 bombers or Eshelawn. SAIC isn't anything special, really, other than some of the other things mentioned here (employee ownership, etc.).
If this article is any eye-opener for you, then please don't turn around...
Healthcare article at Kuro5hin
When I was just starting out in the field I worked for SAIC in NewPort, RI. before the days of GPS. They designed a Satelite calibrated Loran system. The best part of the job was going out to sea testing the equipment. We would go out to find a submerged bouy, get to the coordinates, release the bouy to see how close we got. It was a fun job. Ah... but I was young and I wanted my career to evolve and work with embedded controllers. I'd have to say the SAIC partys were pretty cool too.
SAIC can be a great place to work if you are a PM, VP or above. Otherwise, you are just considered contract labor that will probably be laid off at the end of whatever contract you are on. The VP's and project managers move on to the next contract and the worker bees are all let go. Great place to be a boss. ('Course if the PM ticks off the contractor (The Army, in our case), the contract closes even earlier, all the worker bees get terminated, and the PM just goes on to the next SAIC contract. I was the last one out the door of about 70 FTE's.) The weirdest thing about SAIC is that it is so much like it's biggest customer -- Uncle Sam. All the Big VPs used to work in the areas (and Agencies) in which they are now expected to produce contracts. Fancy that.
I used to think the same thing. I've been working at a national lab for about three years now. I have seen at least two tinfoil hat stories about projects that the people I know are working on and have found them to be wild fancies. Does the govt do some shady tings? sure. But it's not that prevalent or extensive.
It reminds me of seeing in one of the old building from the Manhattan Project a large red button with "magic" written on it in a halway with nothing else. We had all sorts of theories about what it did (the building does nuke power stuff, we occasionally had meetings in there). Turns out it was simply the building emergency power shunt.
As for saic, they supply our Q clearence office workers (not the secretaries). These are the guys that print out checks, manage our administrative machines, networking contractors, and that sort of thing. A lot of thier involvement with secret stuff is in supplying that manpower. Of course they also have thier own research staff in other places (much like lockheed-martin or other defense contractors).
The underground tunnels are empty. The Q clearence "secret" stuff is usually mundane. Usually if it really is something secret you are not going to know something about it (take the f117 or sr-71 projects for example). If you do, it is so remote and little that you are going to be wrong or just a very lucky guesser.
------- Sorry about the spelling, I suffer from two problems. Dyslexia makes it difficult to spell well, lazy makes it
I spent a year there, and was glad to leave when I did for the following reasons:
1. Employee Ownership is a crock - since so many of the shares continually circulate - due to employees being laid-off so quickly.
2. Since so many employees are desperate for work you've got to continuously protect your project from being swamped by SAICers like the only lifeboat at ship sinking.
3. The bureacracy is mind-numbing. This is a big DoD company that takes forever to do anything.
4. They bought belcore, which is now telcordia. This is the huge incompetant telecom vendor that sells most of the bad & expensive software to the huge & incompetant telecoms. Seriously - I've seen contracts they've written & Qwest signed that stated that a given product would cost $6m and that Telcordia had the right to raise the price if they didn't sell enough copies. I estimated that almost anyone else could develop a better product for $500k.
5. In the parts of the company that I worked in there was very little interest in providing good customer service. Instead the project teams seemed to be completely wrapped up in internal politics, and the customers were getting screwed.
While there I never recommended any of my friends to join our team, and I'm now glad to have gone on to greener pastures.