Pros
Good pay and Benefits, many very good people
Cons
BWXT makes all of their money on charging hours to the tax payers. I am not sure how they get away with it but they do. Brand new massive vertical machining centers, that us manual clamps, manual alignment, manual tool changes, manual clamps, cardboard chip shields, slowest speeds and feeds possible, smallest tools possible. When you get paid by the hour, why be efficient? Completely ridiculous! I came to BWXT Lynchburg as an experienced professional, having worked for a few major industrial power generation manufacturers, I thought this would be an easy transition. All I can say, is if you have not worked at a national lab, or shipyard, you will be sorely disappointed. Layers of useless bureaucracy, ineffective systems, work-around on top of work-around. Most of this is designed so nobody has any responsibility or reason to do their work. Some of the other sites, in Ohio and Indiana seem a little more realistic, but not NOG Lynchburg. There is no logic to this operation, everything is manual and inefficient as possible. Workers are trained internally and not given any training or information beyond the bare minimum they need to know. This is intentional. I had a 20 year experienced, ultrasonic testing inspector tell me he did not know what a decibel was. The lead engineer explained to me how we bought a bag of rivets, for $300, then managed to spend $60K of the taxpayer’s money, to inspect them, BWXT does not see a problem with this. I also remember management openly laughing when someone suggested using AQAP techniques, why use the quality system used by 98% of manufactures when you can use a 40 year old quality system? Managers use threats, false timeliness, intimidation to get workers to perform, since many others do not have the option of leaving, they put up with it. Managers have no respect in this organization, I believe I was threatened with mandatory overtime at least once a month during my tenure there. Overall my work and an engineer was boring, mundane, and could have been handled by any administrative person with basic technical knowledge. I had applied for another position within the company but was blocked by my manager, Leaving BWXT was the only way to get out of that prison. There are a lot of good people here, they pay well, but if you want to change or improve anything, forget about it.