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Northrop Grumman Says 'I'm Sorry' For Virginia IT Outage
Lucas123 writes "After a storage area network in a data center run by Northrop Grumman went down last week, crippling 26 state agencies' websites — some for more than a week — Northrop Grumman has now apologized to Virginia, saying it will learn from its mistakes in order to recover systems faster in the future. Northrop's $2.6 billion service contract with Virginia's government has come under harsh criticism in the past for service outages, along with project delays and cost overruns."
Fresh out of school with my CS degree I went to work on a project for my employer that involved partnering and working directly with folks from NG. The original deadline for shipping the solution was something like 6 months after I started. The complete and utter incompetence of the NG side of things wound up stretching this out more than 18 MONTHS longer, and the final delivery lacked a lot of the original stated requirements.
Being the newbie to the whole corporate culture, I was shocked that people were not bothered at all by blown deadlines, missed estimates, and huge cost overruns. Shortly after the project finally delivered, I bailed to work for a much smaller company (fewer than 10 employees) where I discovered that I really love the smaller, more dynamic environment that only small companies can provide.
Working for huge corporations just sucks.
I work with a fair number of ngc.com; I'm a contractor myself. At one point, I had a few interviews for Northrop and I'm so glad they over looked my talents because they seem to abuse the talent they have.
Now, this may not be for every department or division, but almost every NGC employee I know is basically well familiar with furlough. Whether good or bad, NGC is left with the ability to place entire departments on furlough to reduce overhead costs in the event a contract dries up. Now perhaps it's their size, perhaps they simply don't care about their workers, but this sort of thing seems to happen often. I'd guess that no NGC employee with a tenure more than 2 years hasn't been out of work for up to a month or so. But this is how things are run there.
See, government contracting works like this. You create a company, hire some folk to work on a contract. Whatever their salary is, you charge the government +50% or more, so essentially the government is not only flat out paying your salary but also the company for your services. If the contract ends, so does your job as the company may not want to charge overhead. In contrast to other business sectors, employment typically isn't grounded so harshly on the existence of a contract, which is where cost of business and business management can keep workers afloat even during down times (think department store).
I only point out Northrop because while all government contracting is essentially this contract+play model, Northrop has a reputation of placing people on furlough much more often than other companies such as CACI, Raytheon, General Atomics etc. Some Northrop employees seem to live the lives similar to actors and actresses in Hollywood, and I'm not talking about Tom Hanks acting, but maybe those actors that get little spots from time to time on your sitcoms. They literally live in apartments, and wait for the phone to ring day after day. Northrop employees seem to wake up in the morning, wondering if they'll still have a job at the end of the day.
What does this observation have to do with the op? Well, it seems that moral and motivation might be a bit low on a large scale at Northrop, so such blunders are no surprise to me.