I was laid off in April, 2010. They gave us 4 reasons on how they selected us:performance, years of service, flexibility, and something else. Everybody who was laid off was on departments' overhead money or about to get on. The truth is no matter how smart and good you are, if you do not have a project to work on, you are very likely to get laid off. Now, let me tell you how you find a project to work on. You go to section head but he gave projects to his friends already. I was asking my section head to switch to different group, and he kept promising it for more than 2 years but did absolutely nothing. Further, when 3 or 4 big contracts were lost, and projects became scarce, he suddenly move 3 friends of his to that group instead of me who was asking him way before. To make it even worse, I had better qualifications than everyone else for such work. That's what you have to do at Raytheon Missile Systems; you have to play politics, take lunches with section head, and even better with department managers, program leads, kiss their butts, luff at their jokes, just go to their offices to ask them how they are doing and chat with them. Even promotions are heavily based on who you are friend with at RMS. Huge chunks of promotions are reserved in advanced for minorities and women, and Raytheon's favorites: veterans. software engineers at Raytheon missile Systems are technically least skilled engineers I met in my life. management is always in get-it-done mood without any idea of time frame, resources allocation. They are so ignorant of modern technical approaches in problem solving. There are good things at Raytheon, but I would not recommend it to anyone especially recent graduates. They do not care about what you want to do, about your progress and career goals. The upper management do not even say hi in hallways.