Blue Origin reviews

3.2

47% would recommend to a friend

(1,200 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 1,200 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
Nov 3, 2020
Recommend
CEO approval
Business Outlook

Pros

- Amazing coworkers. Some of the brightest and nicest engineers anywhere. - The tech is interesting and innovative compared to how NASA does things. - Literally working on spaceships. - Pay is competitive for aerospace.

Cons

- Attrition is the worst I have seen anywhere. I was in the senior half of my team within a few months of joining which is insane. I saw several key individuals leave that were huge loses to the program. So much knowledge and context to previous engineering decisions vanishes when this happens. - In the past year majority of weeks were 60+ hours. Management does not always explicitly ask you to do this, but to actually do your job well a 40hr week is not enough. - To make the previous point worse there are no bonuses for your extra effort - annual/performance based/otherwise. - You better negotiate your job offer heavily because you are rarely promoted or given a raise after that. - A lot of your job will be a fine balancing act between burning down technical debt, some new development, and meeting absurd schedule goals you have no input on and are made at a high level without any consultation. Often with all these things at odds with another.

2.0
Dec 4, 2019

Losing everyone

Recommend
CEO approval
Business Outlook

Pros

Ambitious mission Sometimes, lots of resources

Cons

Culture went from world-class to crap since new CEO joined Toxic management politics Dumb reach-around micromanagement, not understanding the real issues Turnover among management/senior engineers, especially in certain programs, is very high

4.0
Dec 2, 2019

Growing Pains, But Still Good

Recommend
CEO approval
Business Outlook

Pros

The general pool of employees is hard working, motivated, intelligent, and willing to help! I've worked for Blue for 4 years, and gained more practical experience in a few months than I did in a few years at a previous employer. The work - Lots of technical challenges await and opportunities to take ownership! The mission - Very exciting. Easy to get passionate about the mission and being a part it. It never gets old walking around space vehicles and making it work as a team. Your colleagues - Overall very good. I remember first starting, trying to learn the rocket, and people would take an extra hour out of an already long day to help me learn. It was refreshing to see people who cared about their job and their fellow employee's succeeding.

Cons

Management - Not very impressed with senior leadership these days. There's a general lack of connection and communication. The unrealistic scheduling can be de-motivating. I keep seeing managers come into a role, thinking there's margin in the schedule to pull out, and the team can do it faster, when in reality, the schedule was already success based. It's demoralizing to have people who don't understand projects come in, give an arbitrary deadline, and then see the team miss it because it wasn't a realistic goal to begin with. Expectations - When I started, there were clear expectations of how much and how hard to work. As the company has grown, expectations have become less clear, so that some new employees and managers do not have the same idea of expectations. I'm speaking specifically about hours, weekend work, and last minute travel. As a company, we're having a bit of an identity crisis on if we're targeting a work life balance as some managers believe, or if we're really pushing to meet our company's ambitious goals. Quality Assurance - I don't see this organization adding value at Blue in their current capacity. I have a bias, in that I've never seen a QA organization add value at previous employers (stand around a job site chatting and then sign off their special QA block), and I'm sad to see more of these folks showing up here. Everything I've seen so far involves more people walking around and "watching" you do work when we really need more people "doing" work and justifying their jobs. Recently, I was working a long day, with a QA shadow just walking around to observe our operation, but they certainly left at the end of their shift, while the rest of the team stayed to finish up a 12 hour day. Anyway, we got a rubber AS9100 stamp, so that's something (mostly sarcasm on my part).

Viewing 61 - 63 of 1,200 Reviews

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