Pros
You never have to work, if that sort of thing makes you happy. You get to go out on navy ships which is interesting. Plenty of time off if you are an office worker and actually use your vacation. The United States tax payers pay you obscenely well for the large amounts of OT and travel you will have to endure.
Cons
An abridged list: Management and Culture: There is rampant family nepotism here, particularly involving the LDS church, to the point where there was an internal investigation. Because getting fired is unheard of, promotion is often used as the only way to evict lousy employees out of a department, resulting in a scum of idiots floating to the top of the bucket. Sexism is widespread and almost all of my female engineer coworkers have since quit. Ineffectual unions mire work and drain tax dollars. Above all, a choking miasma of endless layers of complacency and self-righteousness infest the docks, the work, and the dour cement buildings that house the management. Coworkers: The hiring guidelines here specifically state to recruit only engineering graduates with lower GPAs for fear that more intelligent workers will quickly leave due to boredom, frustration, and anger. This means that you get to meet, suffer, and then watch truly abhorrent people (physically [yes, with their fists] & emotionally abusive, fraudulent, narcissistic) literally win cash rewards from the fools in charge. I’ve met only five people in my life who I hope no other human will have to endure; 3 of them, like maggots in a corpse, were happily burrowed at PSNS. Work and Working conditions: This is a maintenance yard for giant complex war machines (the Melters of Innocents as I like to call them) and almost no new design is done here. 95% of the “engineers” are only there to read, interpret, edit, and sign paper work (all using frustrating decades old technology) so it can then be passed down through the gauntlet of bureaucracy until, hundreds of man-hours later, a bolt is turned exactly 90deg CCW… oh wait, the wrench is the wrong color and/or the mechanic isn’t union certified on that bolt!! Start over. Most minds, both engineering and technician, are so atrophied from years of blindly followings reams of procedures, that it would be very dangerous if anyone had a creative thought. The work reserved for “engineers” is only just procedural planning and should be done by the people who know it best: ex sailors and mechanics. But the broken hierarchy represses this valuable class and rarely lets them raise in ranks. For anyone to make even lateral moves here is in for a long and difficult fight. The yard itself is a crusty, industrial, giant span of old buildings, workshops, warehouses, and dry docks. Offices are dingy at best, gulag chic at worst: cement blocks stuffed with cube farms, stained carpets, and few windows, ranging in size from trailers to 9 story buildings. On my last day at work the local wharf rats made a big mess of my desk (I was sitting in 3rd floor of one of the main office buildings) but by that time I was used to them; just another part of working at PSNS. Perhaps like the management, they were just frustrated to see another worker leaving. Overall ethics: I once found out the Navy was happily purchasing $1 bolts for seventy times their value. Thousands of them, for decades. This issues was begrudgingly righted after I fought for it for 3 months. Then I found that the same thing was occurring with simple O-rings. This is a place that charges 10cents per ketchup packet in their dirty little cafeterias, and yet has literally the largest money-wasting infrastructure in the known universe, across the street. Even if one does support our nations’ endless haphazard military adventures, it is obvious that modern wars render ineffectual most of the Cold-war weaponry that is being maintained at PSNS at a stupefying huge cost to the taxpayer. Working here, it didn’t take me long to realize that President Dwight Eisenhower farewell warning had come true. On the day that the Navy killed Bin Laden, there was no celebration in the shipyard, no parades, no articles in the little news rag. No one cared that the entire reason why we were at war for a decade, and thus were all employed, had come to a crescendo and certainly no one lost a night’s sleep over whether we might be laid off for a lack of a war to support! No one cared because PSNS, the Navy, and war is not about this any longer. It is only another business, like Apple or Exxon, syphoning tax money to Northrop Grumman, Electric Boat, and Raytheon. Please, think twice about working here.
