7/10<p>Work as a contractor for one of the largest govt defense contractors in the aerospace and land vehicle field. Lots of opportunity here to work on pretty much whatever you'd like. You can jump on any project ranging from low level embedded devices to application code to virtual reality. Coworkers are pleasant, albeit their skills can be a bit atrophied due to them being in maintenance/bug fixing mode for the past 10+ years of being here working on their own little section of code. Managers are great and leave you alone. My actual team lead only holds meetings once every few weeks, as we mostly use SMS for any instant or urgent information (nothing I work on is classified, and my core team consists of about three other people who do actual coding). I got a cube, and if I need more alone time, I can head to six or more different silo areas where specific hardware is kept for testing, and I can ssh to any machine and just pick up where I left off. They're usually not busy until a release is coming up, which is only a couple times a year.<p>Downsides include the location of the company (lower income state compared to others), weather, and an aversion to change - which I guess kinda comes with a fortune 100 govt contracting company. Computer hardware given to us is atrocious, getting competent new people in is almost impossible due to what we work on and location, and devs don't even need to show they can code. Nepotism is very real, as is having to "know people" in order to advance here. If you are a direct employee, promotions are rare and usually only occur once every 5 to 10 years. IT infrastructure is some of the absolute worst I have ever seen, and it prevents you from getting real work done (imagine having to wait four months to get your favorite free IDE installed or six months to update Cygwin packages, for example. In fact, our IT group still can't figure out how to upgrade a Cygwin install on a shared folder).<p>Pay is decent. As a contractor, you get straight time for every 40 hours worked, and you get 1.5x pay for every six minutes after that. Overtime is basically never mandated or requested, but you are free to work as much OT as you'd like without anyone saying anything. I have personally worked 70+ hour work weeks just for the extra cash, assisting everything from a new GUI, adding new objects to a VR demo, and implementing new functionality to Linux kernel drivers. Even got a pay raise (13% increase!) for all the extra hard work I did on top of all that extra pay, so that was cool.<p>All in all, it's a decent place (especially if you like living in the Midwest) with long term stability. However, you won't really be challenged with truly hard problems if you work here, and growth is stagnant. You'll really need to make the most out of it yourself by pushing management to allow you to implement new stuff, which isn't terribly hard, thankfully. They're willing to listen and implement new stuff, especially if it is a newer product. Harder if it's a legacy project, obviously, but it is still possible.