Don't start your career here - Engineer Blue Origin Employee Review

-Scaling way too quickly -Increasingly “Kool-Aid” Culture -Employees treated like pawns Blue Origin is my first engineering job out of school. If I were to assess the composition of the company, I’d say most senior employees and upper-level managers are ex-aerospace from other companies (Rockedyne, Boeing, ULA, etc.). Blue Origin offers an opportunity for these people to “do it right” by developing products at a new company without process pitfalls and overhead that characterize old aerospace. Arrogance abounds, as most of these individuals have very strong opinions of how the company should be run (perhaps justified). Consequently, it seems like most decisions have a battle for control or hidden agenda implicitly attached. I’ve struggled to find individuals at the company I consider to be honorable leaders, and a lot of them seem to be leaving. As a new employee, you get assigned to a project, and usually there’s a person on the team that Blue wants you to “emulate.” That person assigns you work. This is typical of how industry functions, and if you pair well with the team then there’s nothing wrong with the system. The problem is Blue is scaling so quickly that they pay little to no respect to career history and ambitions of employees. Unless you see and know exactly who you want to be at the company, you can end up in a corner where your job is to take the work off the plate of more senior employees without clear definition of how this helps you get where you want to go (because what you want doesn’t matter). Since the company is scaling so quickly, it’s really tough to find people without an agenda to seek out for career development advice. I’ve had 2 (perhaps going on 3) functional managers in the last year just from company restructuring, not job-performance related. For first time students out of school, I think you are be better off starting at a company like Aerojet, Boeing, ULA, or Lockheed. These companies may be “old aerospace” but they will give you a clear impression of what a functioning aerospace company looks like. Moreover, they have well-established and vetted career development and training programs to help you figure out what you actually want to do and how to get there. The one exception to this I can think of is if you're dead set on working on liquid rocket engines; if that is the case then Blue or SpaceX may be the right place. Blue will likely be here down the road and will still need people if you decide to jump ship from another company someday. Perhaps I’m naive, but friends who work at other aerospace companies in the Seattle area seem more satisfied with their careers right now, even though my job at Blue may “sound cooler”.