All of these big government contractors are terrible. It's the same with the ones who do the IT work. Their business model centres around winning work rather than doing work. They all have very well-funded sales departments but then cut every corner possible when doing the work.
This. Every large IT company I've ever worked for seemed to have an incompetent sales team, who promised to deliver what was actually impossible in order to secure the work.
99% of calls answered within 5 seconds? Yes, we can do that. *
30-minute turnaround on user account creation? Yes, we can do that. *
99% availability of your 15-year-old NT4 systems? Yes, we can do that. *
Deliver a full service with 20 analysts sharing a single 'management server' with 2 concurrent connections? Yes, we can do that. *
* No we ****** well can't.
But the single biggest problem in my opinion is that the salesperson who secured the work gets an enormous commission based on the estimated value of the contract at time of signing. If salespeople's commissions were based on actual realised profit, maybe they'd stop selling things that won't make any money (or worse, will make a loss). Then ALL companies would have to start making realistic bids.