it's good to have a name like Lockheed, Raytheon, Northrop, General Dynamics, Boeing in your resume but most of the work done by them are only interesting at the senior level. As a level 1 or level 2 engineer, you're not really doing anything interesting or something that churns your brain a lot. Plus most of the technology they use are old so you're not getting used to the latest and greatest. I have a couple of buddies who work at the big 3 ( R, LM, NG) and even as a lvl 2 IC Engineer, he is bored out of his mind and in order to stay sharp on his technical skills, he went back to school to do his MSEE. As mentioned since a big defense company name looks good on the resume, and since he's going back for his MSEE, he's getting call backs from a lot of semiconductor places.