Pros
Casual dress, somewhat geeky creative culture, at least in earlier times in Atlanta. vI had a lot of respect for many of my engineering colleagues. I had an opportunity to take on a number of interesting roles and overall, my time there was good.
Cons
Atlanta location's culture (inherited from a start-up which EchoStar acquired) became more stifled as it came under pressure to fit in with the EchoStar corporate culture. Initially, there was cooperation between different EchoStar locations. With time, there developed more of a compartmentalization and a feeling like the different centers were competing with each other rather than working towards a common goal. Other reviewers have done a good job of capturing some of the problems. I will add the following: projects always had official schedules that were unrealistic and nobody honestly believed them. Nothing unusual about that – its been the case everywhere I’ve worked. But it seemed to be more of a problem at this company and it had more demonstrable impact on outcomes. Management insisted on making decisions based on the unrealistic schedules even when another choice would improve the real achieved schedule. In other words, choices were made for short-term benefit in an effort to appear to honor a schedule which had no credibility. This often resulted in actual additional schedule slips and quality problems. There were other serious concerns that I don't feel at liberty to discuss, not even in an anonymous forum. Atlanta Engineering has been closed, although there is an attempt to do a spin-off to take advantage of the assets and technology.
