EchoStar reviews

Pay is below industry average, even for the local area. Benefits are terrible. Overall treatment of employees is horrific. Management is done by intimidation. Executives curse people out in "team" meetings and bang on tables. The management "open door policy" is a joke. The door is only open if you're there to agree with them. If you have a dissenting opinion, but don't have concrete proof that you're correct, you'll get chewed out for wasting their time. Management has referred to entire departments of employees as "monkeys", completely invalidating their value to the company. Nobody cares how hard you work or how competent and productive you are. If you aren't there by 9am and if you leave before 4pm, you may get written up. If you are a useless lump of flesh, but you're at your desk 10 hours a day, you're a model employee. Badge reports are run regularly to make sure you're putting in your hours. DISH Network employees (and some shared services Echostar employees) have to pass through fingerprint scans to get into and out of various buildings. Working at home is not allowed, period. It doesn't matter if your entire job can be done from your laptop with access to the internet and functioning phone, you have to be at your desk, rain, shine, or blizzard. Management communication is non-existent. Don't bother wanting to know about anything outside your immediate team's knowledge, as it isn't going to happen. There is no business plan. There is no sales and operations plan. There are no annual goals. There are no department goals. The company is in business in spite of itself, not because it does anything well. Management overall is clueless and spends their time playing politics and getting promoted. Echostar has more vice presidents than a dozen normal companies combined. Titles are everything. Support systems are neglected and are in many cases decades behind. If you're not working on something new and shiny in Engineering, expect your project to be absolutely last on the priority and funding list. The good-ol'-boys club of executives are all gadget fanatics, but nobody cares whether or not they can sell the product they're designing. Product marketing doesn't exist. Program management doesn't exist. The company is structured in a multitude of silos that act almost like independent dictatorships. Executives fight for their kingdoms to look good to their bosses, but nobody cares if their efficiency gains impact somebody else negatively. Since there is no unification at any level, time and money is wasted because everyone is running in different directions. All problems are solved based upon triage and firefighting techniques. There is no planning ahead, and everyone simply struggles to stay afloat by fighting whichever fire has the current management focus. Charlie Ergen (Chairman of the Board for Echostar) once sent out his 5 golden rules: 1. Know your business 2. Do it right the first time 3. Think long term 4. Spend money like it's your own 5. Take responsibility These "golden rules" are broken so consistently by management that the entire thing is a gigantic joke for the employees. Charlie Ergen once mentioned in an all team meeting that in order to help cut costs, everyone should be willing to pick up and reuse paperclips that are on the floor. Meanwhile, Charlie's forecasting methodology (pure guesswork) results in unused product sitting in inventory collecting dust. Conflicts of interest are common and widespread. Since Echostar and DISH Network split into two companies, we still have several departments that are "shared services". So for example, DISH Network's accounting team does the accounting work for their direct supplier Echostar. Echostar's supply chain department does the material planning for their customer DISH Network. Yet nobody recognizes the inherent conflicts involved in such a relationship. The nepotistic relationship between DISH Network and Echostar means that pretty much anything goes, even though none of these allowances would be acceptable if it was say Echostar doing planning for Comcast or DISH Network doing accounting for Motorola. Echostar does not commonly lay people off. However, entire departments have been let go suddenly with no explanation other than "they were fired". Customer service is horrendous. Even for employees, trying to get your equipment replaced/fixed can be a huge pain. Billing mistakes are common and incredibly difficult to resolve.

The company at an all-hands meeting recently said that "100%, not 99%, but 100% of employees and their families will be on Boost Mobile phone service by march." This was perceived as a threat of layoffs if employees didn't switch their personal phone service over (which is illegal in CO), at their OWN expense (we get a $10 discount). Since then they have kept a list of anyone who hasn't switched their phone service to the company's. Photos of "the list" are circulating all over, with many people I know looking for other jobs. Everyone is expected to subscribe and put a "badge" on their profile. Many expect layoffs based on how they spend their personal money, with employees having weekly+ conversations with their leaders about why they haven't switched their personal phone service. There is so much pressure. People are lawyering up and reporting. If you come into the office past nine, it goes permanently on your record, even if it's only by seconds or minutes, and even if you stay late. This is a company that doesn't know how to compete for top talent. And if it fails, it's because it treated its talent-the talent that IS the company-like children. At the all hands meeting, leadership shared no information with employees. They changed nothing based on employee feedback.