In my general experience, regardless which company, disgruntled ex-employees will always give 1 star review, managers tend to gives bias 5 stars reviews, and anything in between are the more accurate reviews. Now that I have been with this company long enough, It is time for me to give an overview about my experience working with Solute for the past year and a half.
First, I want to address all the negative reviews at Solute. One of the biggest problems with the defense industry in general is that lazy people tends to get by with minimum and mediocre works, once someone has a clearance, their jobs are (for the most part) really secured unless you screw something up really bad. The larger the organization, the worse it get. Why do you think every single big major defense projects often take such a long time to finish, expensive and full of problems ?
Solute, on another hand, is a small company and can't afford to have people like that. People who are lazy, has bad work ethics, bad working attitude or produce mediocre works would get fired really fast in a span of couple months. Reading all the negative comments, I really much can tell who these people are based on what they wrote. I can attest that those guys were all got fired due to poor performance, bad attitude and lack of work ethic. A lot of things they said are often out of context, misrepresent or straight up lies
Solute has a very diverse backgrounds, everyone are treated equally regardless where they came from, their ages, skin color, gender or sexuality. However we are all Americans, Solute would only hired US Citizen due to the nature of our work. The guy who said the company likes to hire foreigners are just simply racist, and I actually know who that is. He was fired for always on the phone and refused to do any works because he though they were beneath him, he took 3 days off work without telling anyone . You get the gist of it.
SOLUTE takes pride on being agile and always keep up to date with the technologies. Unlike other defense companies, you will always get to work with the latest technologies, and not pigeon hole yourself with some decades old technologies. A lot of the projects are interesting, tends to be on the Research and Development nature. You might have to wear multiple hats but you will get to learn a lot in short time. We often joke that working at Solute is similar to going to an extensive boot camp on steroid. It's why a lot of big companies love to scoop up SOLUTE's engineers, from Lockheed, Leidos to Northrop, etc...
Management: one of the principle of agile is that the development team must be empowered to make decisions. You won't have to worry about being micro-managing by some overzealous PM. For the most part, the engineers have full automate to make design decision as a team together without much interfere from upper management. We have some really awesome PM, who would always shield the team from any outside interruptions. They really care about their engineers and often take great care in their people.
The company does provide a great work/life balance. You have a set of schedule 8am-5pm with 1h of break, but you can always work with your supervisor to modify your schedule. If you come to work early, you can go early, and if you come late, you stay late. The company only expect people to work 8h/day but they values the work you do more than how many hours you spend at work. If you have to go early for a doctor appointment or something, all you have to do is tell your PM and they are always ok with that. PM are human and they understand that sometime things happen. Solute doesn't expect you to work overtime. They really much straight up tell you that the company doesn't give OT so they don't expect you to work more than 8h a day. They would never promise to give you OT in the first place, that's why I know the guy in 1 of those reviews lied about that. The company doesn't force anyone to work 16-18h a day.
The company has some of the best principle engineers. These guys always go out of their way to help and love to teach younger engineers. If you actively engage and ask them questions, you will learn A LOT from them. If you just wait for someone to come to you, you are just wasting this valuable resource of knowledge.
Since someone called our the chief engineer earlier, he is actually a really good boss. He know when to step in to take charge to correct the "ship", and when to step back. He is really busy oversee the operation across the company, but if you need helps you can always come to him.
Engineers do the bulk of interviews. The logic is that since you will have to spend most of your time working together, it would be better for the engineers to choose who they want to work with.
I honestly don't know how many engineers get to interact with the CEO beside the principle and some senior engineers so it is weird for me to keep seeing reviews about people's interaction with John. He can be intimidate and intense sometime, but my experience with him has been positive. He gave me some really good advice when I ask him questions. For the most part, the CEO and CTO works a lot on the east coast. The CTO spend most of his time in DC (not dakota), working closely with the Pentagon to advise the navy in a lot of stuff. They are really busy working on company's strategies so I don't understand why some junior engineers would ever have to talk to them.
We only lost 2 small projects that past few months. 1 of them, Solute is just a sub with only 1 engineer on it, the other one were beyond the company's control. However there are several big on-going projects right now, the company just won some really big contracts lately, hiring addition 40-50 new people in a span of 2 months. There are a lot more contracts that the company has a high probable of winning
Last, Solute has a fairly flat structure. Which mean if you are actively engage, good at what you do, the company will give you a lot of opportunities to develop your career. If you want to learn or do something, the company will go out of its way to give you opportunities to do so. The merit is based on what value you could bring in to the table, not how many years have you work there, or what degree you have. So if you think you should get more responsibilities and invitation to some of the important meetings just because you have some advance degree or if you have work there longer, you are gonna be disappointed
