I received no raise in 2004, and I am very unhappy about that. We have a silly rule here where 90 percent get a raise [in a given year] and 10 percent don't. Management's all screwed up. It's not the same 10 percent each year. Most of the time it's people who have a higher salary or are more penetrated into their salary band. I've been an EE for less than four years, and I'm past the midpoint of my salary range for my band.

The most unsatisfying aspect of my job is mandated corporate training. They offer a few technical courses here, but not too many. Most of the time we have to go outside the company for that. But I have to take the mandatory classes every year. They're about how to comply with federal regulations and international regulations — boring, dry, bureaucratic stuff. Lockheed Martin here is obsessed with corporate training. Some years ago, I'm not sure how many, there was a big blowup over Lockheed Martin bribing a Japanese official. I think we get a lot of training because of that.

The Internet is a tremendous resource [for professional training], and I read a lot of white papers published through the IEEE. Someone had an article about using a particular crystal to modulate the optics of an ambient electrical field environment. Very helpful. I also read a lot of NTIA [National Telecommunications and Information Association] and ITU [International Telecommunication Union] documents. A lot of times we can actually call the people who write these documents and get training from them. That's often more helpful than anything else.

I'm not into MP3 players, but I have nice cameras and things of that nature. The engineers I deal with mainly don't watch much television, so we don't really care what our televisions are like. There are engineers here who have been engineers for 35 to 40 years. They probably have a giant Zenith in their living room.