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).