Raytheon is looking for team players who can learn new technologies on their own. Raytheon takes pride in being ISO9000 certified at level 4. ( more info in ISO9000) This means there are policies and procedures for everything and regular audits to see that every employee follows them. When you go to work there, you get a Positional Handbook that tells you exactly how to do every detail of your job. For software developers this means, among other things, that there are multiple, specific steps in software design - from high level requirements to sub requirements to individual module requirements - that must be followed exactly; specific requirements for inline, module, and global documentation; conventions for variable and function naming, etc. Planning and testing are big parts of code development. After a plan is approved, each programmer is expected to follow the plan requirements and design exactly. Slop code is not tolerated - your code must be readable and efficient.

The UofM grad on the recruiting team graduated 2 years ago. Some things that would have helped make the transition to the corporate environment easier included using CASE tools for software development, being required to write good code instead of just whatever worked, learning how to learn new things on your own, working on a team, and learning to interface with other people, including presenting your design to peers and superiors.