Ask HN: What are some non-FAANG companies with great engineering culture? Why?

I know they did some cool stuff a long long time ago, but how do they manage to pull that off? From my experience government contractors make even the coolest job/project a miserable, bureaucratic nightmare destined for the bottom tier of mediocrity. If they don't their government handlers usually do.

Also, Lockheed Martin is responsible for one of the most infamously incompetent IT projects in the history of the world. The FBI's digital case management system. They weren't responsible for the project from the very beginning, but their involvement wasn't blameless.

hope this is sarcastic lol

And it wasn't very productive, which is why I added the "why?" at the end.