Pros
Located in Denver which is a nice, reasonable cost place to live. Low stress and low expectations (one can easily coast through). Cheap TV.
Cons
Very low pay compared to industry standards - - - 10+% less than similar jobs at other engineering companies. Bad benefits for a "technology" company. Vacation time tops out at three weeks (with no carry over provision for unused vacation time), fewer holidays than other companies, fewer sick days, etc. The 401k match is far below the industry standards and has a 5 year vesting period (seems like most tech companies are 4 years). They taut profit sharing but that goes in your 401k with the same vesting period as above so really it only brings the match up to about even with other companies (assuming there's profit to share of course) and then you're still behind because other companies with profit sharing give you a check. Very expensive insurance that provides very minimal coverage. And so on ad nauseum.... No career advancement for a purely technical person - one must move into management to advance. If you fail at being a manager and are still a valuable individual contributor, they'll leave you in the management pay grades without management responsibility (e.g. Directors with no organization to direct) but you can't reach that level without moving into management. And how does one do that if there's no growth or management turn over in the organization? Very poor program management as upper management dictates a finish date without any basis in reality. Individual projects within the program will attempt to make their parts work in isolation, but there is no coordinated program management to make certain the pieces line up together. As noted in another review, upper management likes to micromanage details far below the level of things they should be concentrating on - much to the detriment of the organization. Truly strategic work is really being done. Everything is very tactically driven around today's "hot project" with no one working through the complexities of things that won't be delivered for 2-3 years. Working strategically would alleviate some of the issues associated with lack of overall program management. Very "in bred" on promotion and acceptance of ideas. Ideas for improvement, particularly when process related, are discounted if the idea isn't thought up by a long time employee. When presented by an employee with 20 years of engineering experience but only a short time at EchoStar, the idea is generally ignored with the explanation that "it's not the way we do things at Echostar" or worse "We're a world class engineering organization(1), we don't need to do that". Enough for now. I could go on for pages but we'll leave it with this: It's a dead end job with poor compensation. If you want intellectual challenges that will get you ahead, don't work here. If you're ready to just coast through life to retirement, this could be the place for you. (1) I've heard that expression used and having seen other companies I can say Echostar is at best a mediocre engineering company.
