There always seems to be talk about exciting projects, in 5 years I've never worked on any - Avis employé MTS1 Software Engineer Draper

1. pay is below average (for software engineering in general, perhaps about average for aerospace/defense). 2. Draper likes to make it seem like there are tons of opportunities to work on exciting, new projects when in reality very few people get the chance to work on said project, and additionally funding for said projects seems to come and go. 3. Due to it being a matrix organization, you have to be comfortable selling yourself (which I generally am not) otherwise you'll never be able to work on the more interesting tasks and additionally your career will pretty much go nowhere. To elaborate, I've never worked directly with my boss and most of the time he works on completely different programs. Based on this he has little incite into the work I do, and since I'm generally a reserved person, the result has been most of the work I do goes unnoticed.