On the bench

John is still onboarding. Raytheon has a very strange onboarding system for their new hires. After John started work last month, we discovered that he didn’t actually have a specific role on a specific team yet. That explained why we couldn’t figure out who is new boss was going to be! The company needs engineers and scientists, so they’re hiring them, and figuring out later where exactly to put them!

John and numerous other new-hires are in an office off-site, under a temporary manager. There, the new hires take endless training courses and wait assignment.

The big news from last week was that one of the other new hires got an assignment that he turned down! All the other new hires were like, wait, can you do that? The guy, Jeff, is an experienced, senior engineer and he wasn’t willing to do the kind of work they offered. Everyone watched to see what would happen. Would they tell him he had no option? If he refused, would they ask him to quit? Apparently Jeff was willing to take that chance. The job they offered wasn’t what he had expected, and wasn’t worth it to him, so Jeff decided to wait for a better offer. But would they give him something else?

The thing is, there isn’t a “they”. There’s no one omniscient person or team responsible for placing the new hires. The new hire resumes are being shopped around and job placements come in when a manager decides he wants one of them. The placements come in almost the same way a job offers comes in when you’re job hunting. You don’t know when you’ll get an offer, how good it will be, or how many other offers you may (or may not) get. And the new hires don’t know how long is “ok” for the placement process to take.

The new hires are being paid meanwhile, but they’re being paid out of overhead rather than having a project to charge. How long can they hang out in limbo-land, training, and charging overhead before they go to work on a real project? Turning down a placement offer took some balls!

John says it’s like being picked for a sports team – no one wants a bad assignment but not one wants to be the last one picked either!

Well, John’s coworker, Jeff, got lucky and a second offer came in a week later. Jeff was much happier about the second offer and gladly accepted. Good for him for holding out for what he wanted!

As you can probably guess, John’s not just waiting around for a placement. He is used to writing proposals and bringing in money – a very valuable skill for any company, right? So he’s been busily setting up meetings and suggesting ideas and trying to get programs started. But he doesn’t have an insider’s understanding of the company, so it’s like he’s driving blind. It’s unclear how to get his own ideas off the ground – or whether that’s even possible at Raytheon.

It seems like Raytheon tends to mostly just respond to their customer’s requests, rather than proactively suggest ideas. I think the difference is that John comes from an innovative research environment rather than a strictly contractor environment. Raytheon may not necessarily have internal processes set up to enable John to bring in funding.

John has also discovered that he was hired into a section of Raytheon that isn’t optimal for him. It turns out that he was hired into the section whose main customer is the Navy. But because of John’s specialties, he should have been hired into the section that serves the Air Force instead. There had been no way for him to tell he was being hired into the wrong section when he accepted the position – he was given very little information at the time. Back then, he couldn’t even tell Raytheon was organized around customer lines.

The managers who hired him should have been able to tell based on his resume. It seems like a mistake on their part, but I assume they wanted John anyway, even though they probably realized he would have been a better fit in another part of the company. They were glad to snag him for themselves!

So now John’s considering whether (and if so, how) to get himself into the section of the company that works with the Air Force. Or maybe he will decide he’s just fine in the Navy division. (Don’t worry, he would still be here in Tucson either way.) If he is determined to get into the Air Force division, it is unclear whether he should just continue to reach out to the managers whose projects appear to be more appropriate for his background as he has been doing, or whether he should actually re-apply to a different job within Raytheon.

At Sandia we called that process post and bid. It means an employee can bid (apply) for a publicly posted job opening if their current management isn’t motivated to let them simply make an internal move. If they are the chosen applicant and are offered a posted job, their current manager can’t block the move. Sometimes managers will post a job opening specifically to poach a valued employee from someone else’s team.

But at the moment it appears that John could go wherever he wants within Raytheon. So he’s scrambling to figure out what departments and programs are doing work that is a good fit for his background. He’s setting up lots of meetings trying to find and connect with a manager who can utilize his speciality knowledge and skills.

I know that John is going to get it all figured out and do great because he has so much to offer. But meanwhile he’s in an unenviable position of basically having to job hunt within his new company. And what if someone offers him something that’s a poor use of his skills before he’s able to find something that suits him better? Will he turn it down?

By the way, just so you can understand the difficulty – Raytheon is huge. There have something like over 13,000 employees here in Tucson alone. That’s why the program managers can’t just sit down and have a little internal meeting and figure out where to optimally place all their hundreds of new engineers!

John has already found some work for a team where he feels useful, so he has about a quarter of his time filled up. He also has been lining up a lot of other proposals and possibilities. Knowing him, he’s probably working harder at getting situated than any of the other new hires. And he’s probably going to overshoot and end up with far more work than he can manage. I guess if that happens, he knows where to find the pool of new hires for help!

To send Kristina a comment, email turning51bykristina@gmail.com.

Kristina’s Website: Life Coaching for Adults with Autism