Inside SAIC 293
An anonymous reader submits this profile of SAIC, Science Applications International Corporation, the behemoth defense contractor/research outfit/spymaster.
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Inside SAIC
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Private Company (Score:2, Insightful)
This is what people need to be reading (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
What does being listed have to do with secrecy? (Score:5, Insightful)
What, like these companies?
Boeing [wsrn.com]
Lockheed Martin [wsrn.com]
United Technologies [wsrn.com]
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?
Re:Huh?! (Score:3, Insightful)
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.
Re:SAIC is Employee-Owned - Employee-Ownership Roc (Score:5, Insightful)
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.
Re:employment and advancement (Score:5, Insightful)
Large corporations are machines. If you don't exist on paper, you don't exist at all.
In all seriousness, if you were an HR person with thousands of employees to track, how would you track them? Get to know them around a campfire singing camp songs or, perhaps more conveniently, a datastore holding all your worthwhile attributes? If it isn't in the data model, it
can't be worthwhile, can it?
Internal Pyramid Scheme? (Score:3, Insightful)
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.
Re:There's certainly more to it (Score:2, Insightful)
Re:Private Company (Score:3, Insightful)
SAIC ***bought*** Network Solutions. Many many many years after the ARPAnet contracts. They then spun the stock off for a very handsome profit. They did not in any way help create the technology.