Blue Origin reviews

3.2

47% would recommend to a friend

(1,199 total reviews)

Dave Limp

34% approve of CEO

41% positive business outlook

Blue Origin has an employee rating of 3.2 out of 5 stars, based on 1,199 company reviews on Glassdoor which indicates that most employees have a good working experience there. The Blue Origin employee rating is in line with the average (within 1 standard deviation) for employers within the Aerospace & Defense industry (3.6 stars).

Reviews by job title

1K reviews
1.0
Jun 3, 2021
Recommend
CEO approval
Business Outlook

Pros

Building rockets is amazing and the mission is really inspiring.

Cons

Can't keep Sr. Leaders and the turn over rate is embarrassing. Bob Smith is completely out of touch and never leaves his ivory tower. This is the only company I've ever worked for where you're practically forbidden to speak with Sr. Leaders! Hopefully Jeff Bezos will step in at some point and get this company functioning correctly so employees will stop running out the door.

3.0
Mar 5, 2021
Recommend
CEO approval
Business Outlook

Pros

The company is well funded, which is a huge benefit in the aerospace industry. While competitors are more beholden to investors or government contracts, Blue is more robust to political changes. This enables product teams to work to completion while others may run out of funding or kill projects based on new administration priorities. There have been many opportunities to grow professionally at Blue because there is so much work to be done. The lack of pre-defined career paths can actually be beneficial for individuals who want to explore different roles (assuming they can find bandwidth to take on that additional work). I prefer this flexibility compared to more well-defined structures. Put simply, Blue Origin does cool things. The company is relatively open internally, so curious individuals can learn what's going on across the board by exploring the internal wiki pages. I believe in the long-term Blue will be successful in "building the road to space" and it's exciting to be a part of that work.

Cons

Prioritization of work is very reactionary and rarely data-based. Edicts flow down from the CEO frequently, which causes a lot of churn and leads to lack of completion for what used to be the "top priority". The response from leadership is that workers need to be better at doing what they say, which is a disappointing conclusion to make. There is lack of ownership by top level management on the direct impact that frequent shifts in direction have on the ability to make progress quickly. The organization follows a fairly strict hierarchy. Delegation and accountability aren't very well established (outside of spending/purchasing, which is well defined). This leads to difficulty in decision making when individuals don't believe they have the authority to approve, leading to re-explanation and rubber-stamping from upper management without any value-added review. This is likely a common problem with hierarchical companies, but I think this has a more stark impact given the rapid growth of Blue in the last 5 years combined with the number of decisions needed to effectively scale the company. There is a lack of clear vision for how to get Blue to its goal of "millions of people living and working in space". That vision needs to include the prioritization of initiatives (discussed earlier). The vision also needs to identify what is differentiating technology for the company that we should innovate in-house. The confusion between "make it here" and "find a third party" results in half-hearted efforts to build critical infrastructure (mainly enterprise systems), which has significant impacts on the ability of individuals to complete their work efficiently.

1.0
May 12, 2020

Flimsy Management, Fake Mission

Anonymous employee
Recommend
CEO approval
Business Outlook

Pros

I have met some high caliber peers and appreciate having new contacts throughout the industry.

Cons

Low pay drives many high perfomers to leave quickly - politics make it clear that this is an aerospace company spinning goals and vision for votes and salary concessions. Poor management exacerbates the attrition.

Viewing 34 - 36 of 1,199 Reviews

Glassdoor has 1,373 Blue Origin reviews submitted anonymously by Blue Origin employees. Read employee reviews and ratings on Glassdoor to decide if Blue Origin is right for you.