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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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"Men lie."
"Yeah, about sleeping with other women, but never about bioluminescent plankton."
-Dan Brown
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."
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.
I worked at SAIC and the oddest thing there was that as an employee you were really dealt with like a contractor. You worked on your project until it was done, and when it was done you were left to your own accord to find a new project to work on. You could hope that your manager would take you with him/her to their next project - but your skillset wouldn't always allow that.
Very strange indeed, having to worry about your job all the time.
joe.
I almost worked for SAIC a few years ago. I was about to accept their job offer, but then I was turned off when discussing advancement opportunities within the company. Apparently, unlike most of geekdom which is ruled by skills, the only real way to advance in SAIC is to hang a bunch of degrees and certifications on your wall. Regardless of your skill level, degrees and certifications are what count towards promotions and advancement.
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. IMO, there's no hard and fast rule either way. Degrees don't make you smart and vice versa.
Why do I h8 apple?
I bet at least 20% of /. readers are in the gov't and defense industry. 'Course, they don't have nearly as much time to write comments as all the unemployed dot-commers.
(ok, before you flame me, I can make fun of unemployed dot-commers because I was one back in the day. An awful lot of us landed in the defense world.)
"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."
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.
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?
"Accept that some days you are the pigeon, and some days you are the statue." - David Brent, Wernham Hogg
After reading the article through two or three times, I can certainly say it's interesting. What is REALLY interesting though is the message embedded in the article. Didn't expect that, did you?
Seriously, check it out. ROT13 the article, then drop every other character. Finally, use the alphabet backwards starting a S for one char, then A for the next, I for the next, C for the next, and repeat.
VERY clever. The message is certainly worth the effort decrypting.
KIKOMANSAIC 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.
Zero.
The purpose of national security is to secure the civil liberties of the citizens. Trying to trade civil liberty for national security is like selling your kidneys on the black market to raise money to buy health insurance.
Tom Swiss | the infamous tms | my blog
You cannot wash away blood with blood
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.
We're going down, in a spiral to the ground
I'm a subcontractor at Lockheed Martin along with a number of SAIC subs, and I can't say that I've been all that impressed with all of them. Most of them that I've known have been testers, so maybe that's the low rung at SAIC. Also, they never appeared to be that happy with SAIC.
I'd much prefer to be in my situation, where two guys own 51% of the company and give out stock to exceptional employees instead of everyone. They make sure we get great benefits, and despite our high fringe rate, our overall rates are still lower than most because of our low overhead.
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.
when you leave you're forced to liquidate all your holdings in the company.
As long as the company size is growing or stable there's no problem here.
What, pray tell, would happen if some big contracts didn't come through and a bunch of people were all let go at the same time?
Seems to me, with the constrained marketplace for SAIC shares, you could get a big drop in the effective share price. The people going out the door would be doubly pissed: once for having been let go, once for getting a pittance for their shares as they depart into the ranks of the unemployed.
"Provided by the management for your protection."
That's a good question. :-) SAIC has got a broker/dealer subsidiary called Bull, Inc. that essentially operates an internal market that allows employees to buy or sell shares. The price is determined by a process too complicated for me to explain (based on performance of similar companies, other external market factors, etc.) It sounds a bit unusual (like the fox guarding the henhouse, since Bull is an SAIC subsidiary) but something must be working.
We're going down, in a spiral to the ground
Imagine one of those robots (depicted in the article) approaching you with its menacing video camera peering at you. What's the first thing any sane person would do... labotomize it (and in the process gain a free iPAQ).
come on fhqwhgads
I've got a trackball built by SAIC. It's lasted me for, oh, 5 years? And it still shows NO signs of anything approaching failure. I got it off ebay, the seller claimed it was designed for submarines and I wouldn't be surprised. It's ugly as hell and about 1/3 the size of a 104-key keyboard but with keyboard key buttons instead of lame ass normal microswitch type buttons. I have yet to figure out how to take the ball out to clean it, but then again, it has never been necessary to do so. .45 round right through the middle and keep on working. Pair this up with one of those old IBM "tank" PS/2 keyboards and NOTHING will ever stop you from inputting into your computer.
I have the distinct impression that this thing could take a
Quando Omni Flunkus Moritati
I have a relative who works for SAIC, and it's not all spooks and defense work. The National Institutes of Health also sub contracts large portions of it's intramural research to SAIC labs, both on the main Bethesda MD campus and sattelite campuses scattered around. As for the quality of the organization, relative to the rest of the NIH, it really depends. The cost sensitivites are a bit different than working for the government proper, and perhaps there is a slightly higher caliber of employees at SAIC, but that may as much be the lack of cushy, sit in the break room and read the paper, job security a government job gets you.
Seems like you can't swing a dead cat without hitting an SAIC employee.
Man, government regulations are getting harsh.
I can answer this from my own experience.
I was an employee there (1988-1993). When you signed up for a 401(k), the first $2000 of your contributions and all of the companies contributions
went into company stock.
Once a quarter, you could trade out of company stock, but you had to take the initiative.
If you were a high-level manager, I suppose you would have to explain why you kept selling SAIC stock.
But I was just a programmer there and I did sell blocks of stock that were in my IRA.
I would have made more money if I had left it in SAIC stock though.
The article says that they beat the S&P 500 and I can attest to that during the years I was there.
In 20 years of working in the computer business I have never seen more formal project management -- especially on fixed price contracts.
"We can't solve problems by using the same kind of thinking we used when we created them." -- Albert Einstein
The city where I live in Canada is the provincial capital. A number of years ago the provincial government created a new health care agency called SHIN whose purpose was to facilitate the development of a provincial health care network. SAIC was awarded the contract to do all the necessary IT work involved to make SHIN's vision a reality.
They have done some really cool things. They utilized the existing Internet infrastructure to allow pharmacists in remote areas of the province to be able to send their prescription data to a mainframe here in Regina. They have also provided doctors with wireless communications using PDAs for appointments, emergencies, etc. The grander picture here is that since the province was wired with fibre-optic cable a long time ago (thanks to the wide-open geography and a telephone company with a lot of foresight) they plan on allowing doctors to view CT scans, MRI scans, etc. real time over a network. There are also plans in place to even have surgeries performed where a general surgeon is performing the operation in one location being guided by a specialist in a different location.
SAIC definately does some neat stuff and as time passes I hope that the work they do benefits the pathetic health care system we have right now.
I worked for a compnay that was acquired by SAIC in the late 90's, and there was a lot of concern by some employees about working for "a military industrial complex" company. So SAIC invited all employees to hear about the tremendous non-military stuff they did. One guy spoke at length about SAICs' position in health care research. At the end of his talk, an employee asked "so, exactly what kind of health case research are we talking about here?" The red-faced reply from the SAIC guy: "Uhh... the effects of nuclear radiation on the human body". Sigh.... so close and yet so far....
The last time I wrote code, it was Morse
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.
While I currently don't work there, I put in nearly 14 years at SAIC. I could write my own long article about it, but I'll try to summarize:
1. The most important thing to remember is the company is set up to make money through strong cost control measures. This mostly describes the rest of the items.
2. If a contract ends for any reason, you've got 2 weeks to find a job within the company, if you don't you are out of the company. It rarely carries employees who don't have a contract to charge to. They did improve and add programs to make it easier to see what jobs are available.
3. Some employees are more equal than others. These are the few that know somebody that can carry them longer than 2 weeks while they look for a job. They also tend to get paid more for equal or lesser work. The more equal ones tend to be around long enough to really score on the internal stock.
4. The company is a collection of lots of little companies that don't talk well to each other, and fight over all kinds of things. If they don't make money, the managers get removed or the group/division/project goes away.
5. Contrary to the article, a lot more work is done at SAIC in more mundane areas including software testing, maintenance, and other "fun" activities for other companies or Gov't contracts. I know I was on several of them, but I did get to work on some fun contracts also.
That is probably enough for now. If you need a job, SAIC is a decent place to work depending on which little company inside it you end up in. You can also get some decent experience, but as always keep your eyes open.
The funny part about working for SAIC (which I do) is that we (SAICers) read articles all the time about how exciting and revolutionary we are or how we are developing some new and exciting technology to solve some incredible problem and we just say to each other, "Did you know we did that?" Then we go back to our middle of the road technology on our over-managed, over-budget projects and wonder if that group is hiring...
The official line is : Science Applications International Corporation (SAIC), a Fortune 500 company, is the largest employee-owned research and engineering company in the United States. We provide information technology, systems integration and eSolutions worldwide.
The important point is that we are very diverse. The best explaination of our corporate makeup is to describe a solar system of companies with SAIC corporate in the middle. The organzation is very flat and transparent.
As much as I like the cuetsy characterizations of SAIC as a spy haven with wizards and towers and stuff, the truth is less exciting. The vast masjority of our constacts are straight meat-and potato development and support work. We do just about anything tech related, and we do it very well. please disgregaurd the SIG below.
"God fights on the side with the best artillery." - Napoleon, Marshal of France - speaking truth to power
When "Randi" went to a monetary challenge without a clearly verifiable -- widely recognized -- objective for acquiring the money, he departed from so-called "science" and entered dispute processing. His failure to allow adjudication via normal dispute processing leaves his definition of "scientific" in dispute just as much as it would if PSITECH were to try to define a panel of retired federal judges as "scientific" -- which they didn't. Rather than rhetorically posture about "my scientists are holier than your scientists" PSITECH just did the honest thing -- particularly given Randi's insistance on (and I'm sure everyone's hope of) avoiding the courts -- and that was what most people do when they avoid courts -- they find a suitable substitute usually via arbitration.
Seastead this.