My experience – Cyber Security Engineer assignment at Leonardo / ESA
My experience – Cyber Security Engineer assignment at Leonardo / ESA
I worked for three months for Leonardo, on an assignment at ESA, as a Cyber Security Engineer. This review reflects my personal experience and the situations I personally encountered during this period. It is not intended to represent all Leonardo employees or teams.
After more than twenty years working in IT and infrastructure, I have experienced many different professional environments, including complex projects and situations involving significant pressure. Nevertheless, this assignment particularly stood out to me because of the difficulties I experienced with organization, communication and work management.
From the beginning of the assignment, I noticed what appeared to me to be a significant lack of visibility regarding the organization of the team. There was no shared calendar showing people's availability, and it was sometimes difficult to know who was responsible for a particular task or who was available.
I also sometimes discovered during the daily meeting that a task had been assigned to me without having previously received any context or explanation. When I requested information, approvals or access necessary to perform the work, responses could take a long time or, in some cases, not arrive at all. In a complex IT environment, this can make it difficult to work efficiently.
I also experienced limited management presence on site. Several emails concerning leave, working hours or operational matters received no response. Individually, these situations may seem minor, but taken together they contributed to my overall impression of insufficient communication and follow-up.
The management of priorities was another difficulty. Tasks were sometimes presented as extremely urgent and were then quickly replaced by other urgent priorities. This made it difficult to plan and complete work efficiently.
The daily meetings were also problematic. The 9:15 a.m. daily meeting was mainly conducted in Italian, even though some members of the team, including myself, did not speak Italian. As a result, we could not always understand the information being discussed. In an international environment, I would have expected a common language understood by everyone involved.
I encountered several difficulties regarding access to tools and infrastructure. Access to certain SharePoint areas, the Leonardo intranet and ESA facilities required repeated requests. In some cases, the absence of a response or the lack of a designated replacement person prevented work from progressing.
Another concern was the documentation and procedures available to me. I did not find a sufficiently structured knowledge base allowing a new team member to quickly understand the architecture, operational procedures and responsibilities. The lack of a clear ticketing or task-tracking system also made the work heavily dependent on verbal communication.
As a Cyber Security Engineer, I was particularly concerned by certain practices that I personally observed, including the use of personal computers or connections, shared credentials, external cloud services, and the transmission of screenshots through communication tools. Some of these screenshots could contain technical information relating to the IT environment. From my perspective, these practices raised legitimate security and confidentiality concerns in an environment presented as highly secure.
I am not claiming to have had a complete view of Leonardo's security environment. I am only reporting practices that I personally encountered or observed during my assignment.
I also encountered more basic organizational and workplace issues, including network cables in circulation areas and situations where certain rules did not always appear to be consistently followed.
Finally, I was surprised by the travel arrangements of some team members who appeared to travel regularly between Italy and Belgium. Regardless of the reasons behind these arrangements, they raised questions for me regarding cost, efficiency and environmental impact.
Overall, my experience was disappointing. The main difficulty was not the technical complexity of the project, but rather the combination of communication problems, changing priorities, access difficulties, limited documentation, dependence on individual people and insufficient follow-up.
I want to emphasize that this review concerns only the three months during which I worked with this particular team. It is not intended as a general judgment of Leonardo or its employees.