Blue Origin reviews

Having read all the reviews on here before, I was skeptical of their authenticity. HR assuaged my worry by saying, "Oh it's Glassdoor, anyone can post a review, and we can't take it down." Every. Single. One. Has. Truth. This place is smoke and mirrors, with everyone that has any power or responsibility shirking it and pointing at someone else, saying, "Oh, it's their fault if they don't do anything about this.". Massive cycles and circular dependencies are formed like this that permeate management and engineering, crippling the company's ability to do anything or react. I see vestiges, ghosts of the denizens of a bright, beautiful company long gone still sipping coffee saying, "This is fine." Stay away. And leave.

The biggest area where Blue could improve is in their compensation scheme. A survey of colleagues indicates that annual pay increases (sans promotions) average about 3.5%, which is less than the Seattle-area cost of living growth. So in real-wage terms, we actually take a pay cut every year. That is demoralizing, especially for those who put in very long hours on behalf of the company, and has resulted in a more than a few departures I can name. With new entrants such as Project Kuiper coming to town, Blue will struggle to retain their top talent. The second area of improvement deals with the culture of upper management. Unlike the low-mid management, the upper-level folks were generally hired from outside, and almost universally came from Big Aerospace (disproportionately Honeywell) or government. Unsurprisingly, their arrival has had a negative effect on morale and decision-making speed, and by replacing technical experts with MBAs, more than a few ill-conceived program decisions have come to pass. Perhaps most harmful, the new upper management has swept aside our prior culture of a flat management structure which trusted their delegates to make the right decisions and independently execute them, and replaced it with a tall management structure which second-guesses technical decisions all the way up the ladder. The new company org chart is still flat at the bottom, but now features a towering spire of upper management, with program leads reporting to VPs, who report to Senior VPs, who report to Senior Exec VPs, etc... It seems every few months, a new layer of upper management is invented, into which another one of Bob Smith's Honeywell bros is inserted. And every time this happens, the CEO becomes more disconnected from the real technical problems at hand. Rob Meyerson lead by example by being a technically gifted leader who knew exactly what he was asking for when he said "Go do this!", and we respected him for it. Our current management substitutes lead-by-example for lead-by-powerpoint. We now have "Leadership Principles", complete with buzzwords that would not be out of place on corporate motivational posters. The company equity incentive program is nearly worthless. The conditions required for one to cash-in on company are very strict and narrow, and so unlikely to occur that the equity agreement is better used as toilet paper.