Pros
The only pro is that you can gain experience to get a better job elsewhere.
Cons
The environment is toxic. There is a bully-victim culture. The different teams do not work well together, and there is open antagonism between different teams. Managers are openly insubordinate to senior managers and badmouth other teams. The Spacecraft Operations Center (SOC) is known as "The Ivory Tower" in the Cheyenne Broadcast Center, because many of the other employees in the Broadcast Center perceive that SOC employees feel like they are better than everybody else. That can make it difficult to interface with other departments. There are very limited opportunities for professional growth. Most of the long time employees have found their niche and have no incentive to train new people. As a new engineer your responsibilities will be mostly technical writing and administrative tasks. There is a feeling that if too much effort is put in to training new people, they will leave the company to get another job sooner. There is a strong emphasis on "the way we've always done things". EchoStar does not want to invest the time in keeping their processes up to date. There is a lot of employee turnover. From about 2004 to 2013 I know of four recent college graduates hired as engineers in the Cheyenne SOC. All of them have now moved on. Three of them left on bad terms, and the other one left the company as soon as he could find a better job. During the same time period I know of three other more experienced engineers who left because they did not like the environment. The Cheyenne engineering team target size was five to six people during these years. The salaries tend to be on the low end of the industry. The bigger problem we had with recruiting was that the Cheyenne area tends to be unappealing to young people. And living in Fort Collins is not acceptable because the distance is too great to fulfill your on-call responsibilities promptly. The Gilbert, AZ office seems not to have as many problems as the Cheyenne office. If you have the opportunity to go there it may be better for you.
