Avantages
If you're the kind of person that just needs job security and decent benefits in exchange for doing what you're told eight hours in a day, this is a good company for you, possibly even one of the best. If you are happy with your current skill set and do not want to work too hard to change or learn new things, you can find a comfortable cubicle at Lockheed. I've talked with others who had worked for other large corporations before working at Lockheed, and they all agree that Lockheed is better. So as far as large corporations go in general, Lockheed is not bad. Much of what I have to say about the downsides probably applies generally to this type of corporation in the context of being a software engineer.
Inconvénients
In a nutshell: this company is not recommended to software developers who are driven, passionate, curious, and who take their craft seriously. The workforce consists of soulless clock-punching factory workers marching to the slow beat of a gigantic, impenetrable bureaucracy under the iron fist of stifling, heavyweight processes. The mental atrophy that I was exposed to during the long hours of the day at Lockheed was steadily taking its toll on me. Had I stayed there long enough, I would have become more and more apathetic and docile until my passion for software development finally died. If you are a software developer and you have a job offer from Lockheed Martin, I strongly urge you to consider what kind of a developer you are and what kind of an environment you're comfortable in. If you take pride in your work and in doing things the right way, or if you are driven to learn new things, think twice before accepting that offer. If you actually enjoy coding and you do it for free in your spare time, you will find yourself alone at Lockheed. If you like to have a choice in the tools, languages, frameworks, or platforms that you use to do your work, or if you even have any strong opinion whatsoever about these things, do not sign that offer letter. One of the most disappointing things about my time at Lockheed was the fact that there was no one I could look up to as a software developer. Until that time I had always had people to look up to; people who were better than me and repeatedly proved it. It's important to have that, because then you have an incentive to push yourself and a vision of what you can be. I sorely missed that at Lockheed, and I'm glad to say that I've since found an environment where I can learn from others who are better than me. There is a cult of seniority; a trite ranking of levels that have little to do with how good you are and everything to do with how long you've been there, at least for the first few levels. After that, the usual political maneuvering applies. The performance review process starts out with you copying and pasting the "personal objectives" that were given to you by management into an internal web application form. Some months later you go back to the web application and fill out how you fulfilled your personal objectives. These personal objectives consist of phrases like "I synthesized the strategic vision and leveraged internal and external synergies." You then get called into your boss's office and he gives you the standard middle-of-the-road approval that he has to in order to balance the quotas in the appropriate spreadsheet for his boss. Process and paperwork take up the majority of activity each day. Stifling quality control is what makes the wheels go round at Lockheed. It's a business focused on integration, not innovation. Plenty of lip service is given to innovation in motivational posters, slogans, recruiting paraphernalia, silly top-down initiatives and the like, but very little of it actually happens. In order to innovate at Lockheed, you have to break rules and make enemies. You have to go under the radar or you cannot accomplish any change. There are many people at Lockheed who have been doing the same thing for years and they will fight you. Even software engineers end up with the job of making sure that the appropriate hoops have been jumped through, all the forms have been filled out, and everything has been approved in triplicate. For all the process and ritual that we had to perform as software engineers, we skipped the important ones like unit testing and continuous integration. As a software engineer, you have no choice in the environment or tools that you use to perform your craft. You get a standard Dell laptop (if you're lucky) with Windows that is fully locked down. In order to install anything, you need to fill out a large form and get approval from around ten different people you've never heard of. This will take a couple of weeks at least. If by that time you need a new version of the software, you will need to submit a form again. You are not allowed to download anything from the Internet without permission. Your computer is controlled by the IT department and they will control it remotely whenever they feel like it. Microsoft Office is used for every piece of information. Outlook is where all the information flow is. You spend a lot of time searching through your Outlook inbox to find that something that you recall somebody sending you at some point. Information about the project your working on can only be found in unsearchable PowerPoint, Excel, and Word documents hidden in an obscure shared directory. Some information is hidden behind the most hideous and time wasting in-house web applications you've ever laid eyes on. Many of them only work with Microsoft Internet Explorer 6.