Inside SAIC

An anonymous reader submits this profile of SAIC, Science Applications International Corporation, the behemoth defense contractor/research outfit/spymaster.

Working at SAIC

[jelwell]

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.

employment and advancement

[ih8apple]

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.

Re:Working at SAIC

[PhoenixK7]

I worked for NASA through them AS a contractor. I didn't have to deal with SAIC itself that much (except for doing online timesheets, and the initial interview/badging at the beginning). The people I worked with all seemed fairly nice. I was working on visualization systems for modeled climate data. Alot of other folks working through SAIC there were working on the actual modeling.

So.. its not all secret black ops and mining traffic for intelligence purposes ;)

Re:employment and advancement

[William Tanksley]

Partially true, but SAIC pays you to get those degrees and certs, since they are required by most of SAIC's customers. They pay for the class and and books in full so long as you make a C or better.

Their policy here makes sense, considering that most of their customers (well, their biggest customer, at least; the US gov't) explicitly check each employee assigned to work on the project, and they don't take the time to verify specific knowledge, only certs, degrees, and experience.

The managers, as far as I've found, are very good at cutting through the BS to find real skill; you will get picked if you've got what it takes, but the manager may have to "sell" you to the customer based on some of your other credentials until you actually get something formal.

Good place to work.

-Billy

Re:Working at SAIC

[envelope]

My wife worked at SAIC, and the uncertainty of the job was part of the reason she left. Ironically, she spent the last couple of months there developing the re-bid to keep the project she was working on. She won the re-bid but quit anyway.
She liked the employee ownership though. We made some money on our shares when she left.
I've got another connection to SAIC: I was in the field artillery in the army and our fire direction control computers were made by SAIC.

Not That Impressed

[rherbert]

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.

Re:SAIC is Employee-Owned - Employee-Ownership Roc

[cje]

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.

Trackball

[The Iconoclast]

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.
I have the distinct impression that this thing could take a .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.

Not just secrets

[dnaboy]

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.

Re:SAIC is Employee-Owned - Employee-Ownership Roc

[KenSeymour]

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.

It's not all covert stuff

[Necrotica]

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.

14 years at SAIC

[Anonymous Coward]

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.

I work for SAIC - This is a misrepresentation!

[N8F8]

We are a large company (40K employees an growing) working on many sizes of tech-related contracts [saic.com] - most small. Most importantly, we are employee owned- 100% employee owned.

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.

Re:What does being listed have to do with secrecy?

[anonymous loser]

Don't forget Raytheon [raytheon.com], Northrop Grumman [northropgrumman.com] (and the former TRW [trw.com]), and General Dynamics [generaldynamics.com], not to mention hundreds of smaller contractors.

And, lest we forget, there are thousands of privately owned companies that have stock holders, boards of trustees, etc. who all face the same issue. There are things you are allowed to disclose, and things you are not allowed to disclose. Stock holders generally don't care about the technical details of every single project that comes along. They are interested in whether it is generating revenue, if it is over budget, etc. These things can be discussed openly without fear of the gestapo coming knocking on the boardroom door.

Dispute Processing and "Science"

[Baldrson]

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.