senior engineer

program manager

operations associate

software engineer

principal software engineer

Savannah River Nuclear Solutions

Typically, a day of work is 10 hours, 3 of those hours will inevitably be spent in some sort of meeting, safety briefing, or site-wide notice.
Then, two hours will be used up for socializing, waiting for people to call you back, and lunch.
The rest of the time can be used to get work done, but alas, the project you are working on needs to be signed off by management from three different departments, and one of those managers is out on a fishing trip for two weeks.

At least they give you unlimited subscriptions to computer science sites and publications, so you can spend that time learning skills to get your next job all that much quicker.  If you choose not to advance your skills for some reason, and just sit on your hands all day fear not, they rarely fire people because they are desperate for warm bodies.

Workplace culture is a quiet acceptance of the choking inefficiency and unreliability of the dilapidated systems on-site.  You do the best you can given the sticks and stones you are issued, and watch as your bosses are given the latest iPhones and supercomputer workstations to send group email chains with.

Make the most of your time by working hard and then polishing your resume.  There is no such thing as career advancement in the traditional sense, it's closer to waiting for people to retire, or being desperately asked to do someone else's job or else everything will explode (literally).

I'ma Project Manager matrixed from a PMO office to another entity. There is contention between my PMO office and matrixed organization. The PMs are caught in the middle like a child whose parents have divorced and keep bickering and owning off parental responsibilities to each other. I have been there almost 2 months and have yet to speak to any manager about expectations, feedback, orientation, career development, or otherwise. Day one, they gave me a cell phone and laptop (whick belonged to my predecessor), no case or charger, no direction on where to take them or what to do with them. I figured all that out on my own. I found my way the building I was to work out of,  walked myself around and made introductions, and worked out what office I would have with other PMs in the building. As far as the work, you have to figure it out. Also, there are obvious single points of failure. These people refuse to show up for meetings or answer calls. And these are the folks that make or break your project. Yet, when presented to management, they shrug their shoulders as if it's not their problem. This is the most bizarre, inefficient, unfriendly, incommunicative place that I have ever seen. No wonder the attrition rate is so high!

I enjoy my job here at Savannah River Site. The Site was built back in the late 40's and has an interesting history. The site is over 300 square miles in size. Mostly just forest and grasslands with some creeks and large ponds. It's located near the Savannah River, hence the name of the company and site. Safety is a part of the culture here as well as security. These are very important because of the nature of the work that goes on out here. 
My job here consists of creating media content for training and knowledge capture. I shoot video and photography, as well as editing, and writing scripts. I also create animations and 3d models to help augment video projects. The hardest part of the job is to get workers here to be comfortable on camera. Some are fine with it, but most others are not and you have to get to know them and make them feel at ease before you can get them to go on camera. The most enjoyable part of the job is seeing your vision come to life when wrapping up a final project. To see trainees not only enjoy the content but more importantly learn and preserve that knowledge they accumulate through watching said content is the icing on the cake.
The only problem I have with working here is the long commute I have. It doesn't leave much time for me during the weekdays to do much of anything.

If you have a good team, and boss then you will have an excellent time like I did. Other parts of the site was mismanaged though. As for programming it was a pretty decent experience. Site security is pretty high so some of the newest technology may not be available. The only problem I had with programming was that a lot of projects would be pushed onto one person. Meaning that if the person left their project got dumped on someone else desk or down the organization tree. Also for my group specifically there was a lack of employees being hired so I had to develop full stack even though I started the job as a back-end dev. Also testing was very subpar and code quality suffered since there was a lack of team members dedicated to testing, QA, or code quality. Some projects would be abandoned due to lack to being able to push them out in time or would be stuck in a constant testing loop before final release.  This being due to one or 2 devs doing one job. I loved my team members and my work that I was doing. That was the best part. Security Clearance process is kind of a long pain in which your job promotion may be on hold for up to 3 years and you may get fired if you don't get the clearance.

Software development at SRNS is about what you would expect from a large contractor for the DoE.

I cannot speak to the site as a whole, but the employees in the corporate IT department were professional and competent.

Opportunities to learn the latest tools and technologies however are minimal.  Most of the projects I happened to be assigned would be considered maintenance work.  Contract-to-perm seems common.  I was offered a position at a steep cut over my contract rate, but did not accept the offer.

In my experience SRNS assigns pay grades based almost entirely on education and years of experience rather than performance.

Work is generally self-paced and consists of a range of web-based and client-server applications.  I was responsible for maintenance and bug fixes for several dozen Java applications.  Other technologies at use during my employment included Flex, JSP and JQuery.  While developers were permitted to use version control and open-source tools, there was no official policy in my group.

Maintaining an independent network using a Microsoft Domain with Windows workstation and Apple OSX clients for the Department of Energy has many challenges.

Each day you learn something new from Computer Security issues, troubleshooting a SQL Server security patch issue, to resolving a Video editing problem with Editors using Final Cut Pro Suite.
My managers were excellent to work for and with as well as my co-workers which were my customers.

They most difficult part of my job was implementing and administering a Citadel Hercules Auditing and remediation system. Is spite of its difficulty its challenges provided much job satisfaction. 
 
The most enjoyable part of my job was working with the Tenable Nessus Scanner and having a licensed version with the Department of Energy. This enabled me to contact and work with the Tenable Nessus Scanner support team to resolve privileged scan issues with workstation clients.

The experience that I have received working for this company is in all very good. The safety precautions that are put in place and practiced are the best I've been able to find in my 34 years of being in the construction world. I have learned a great number of things since working for this company. The hardest part of this job, is having to deal with radioactive work environments. They put you in classes to know and understand the hazards associated with each hazard you may encounter, such as, radioactive, hazardous energy, asbestos abatement, and they give you the tools to work in these conditions. You must pass each class with a grade of 80 percent or better or you can lose your job. The most enjoyable time working for this group is during safety walk downs and and learning new jobs.

(Corresponds to the "Give us your opinion about ...")

Motivating the team to focus on immediate and important tasks is part of a typical day.

A regularly reinforced lesson learned is that others always have better ideas, give them a chance to be heard.

Some management is very risk adverse and want things done the same way, but expect different results.

People want to contribute, however, the culture is such that innovation is not really welcomed; change is uncomfortable to most.

The biggest challenge is breaking the "It has always been done this way" mentality.

Working with really smart, dedicated individuals and genuinely good people has been the most rewarding part of my work experience.

HR is awful in explaining things about the job when first hired, wasn’t compensated for training mandatory to do before even coming to the job, and I never even knew who my managers were until 1.5 months after I was in training. The training is really bad and the trainers don’t care to explain relevant material. They read from power pints then leave you to study for 8 of 10 hrs you’re there. The pay basically just covers the gas you’ll spend to get there unless you live in Jackson, NA, or Aiken. The head of training has no personal skills with trainees and if you ask for help they tell you to ask the other people in your class for help but they have to study as well and may not even know the material. Believe me I thought this place was supposed to be awesome and it’s a waste of time. Unless you love those 3 main areas then this is a dead end. They also can fire you at any moment for anything.

I worked with a very unusual team of managers.  We established a very unique working relationship that was highly proactive and productive.  If we disagreed while decision making, we thoroughly discussed the matter and progressed with the best alternative solution.  We held conference calls with vendors to schedule expert training for certifying and qualifying mechanics to perform their duties at optimum levels.  We had much fun during our status meetings and meetings in general. We also worked diligently at developing the Training Program Description, study guides, classroom instruction, examinations, and technical procedures.  This was one of the best projects that I had ever worked on!

Top Job Titles	Average Salary
Senior engineer 8 salaries reported	$113,445 per year
Program manager 17 salaries reported	$114,156 per year
Operations associate 20 salaries reported	$100,962 per year
Software engineer 6 salaries reported	$98,974 per year
Principal software engineer 7 salaries reported	$116,994 per year

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