Blue Origin reviews

Cool projects, top notch engineering, surrounded by experts

First, I might be biased in my positive experience, I am not sure. But, I've been here a bit over a year and I've had possibly the best experience of my career. I'm new to aerospace/space but had been looking to land in this industry long term. When I joined, I had read all the reviews here, many of which are negative. My previous job (a startup) had absolutely awful leadership, so I was very sensitive to those reviews and on the look out for those type of signals during my interview and first few months after I joined Blue. But I just haven't really seen them - nothing out of the norm, anyway (no company of 3000 employees is going to escape having a few duds in management, unfortunately). My manager in particular has been exceptional and I've gotten a decent amount of exposure to mid to mid-high level management and no real obvious red flags. Is Blue trying to figure out better ways of operating and shifting a decent amount? Yes, absolutely - that's not a bad thing, though. I think some reviews here (complete conjecture on my part) might be conflating the difficulty and complexity of work that is entailed by working at Blue with poor management. It's a really big system engineering challenge (on top of all the other challenges) to do this sort of highly detailed and complex work, needing to make several disparate systems and disciplines all fit together, let alone make everyone apprised to it. There's a reason the saying "it ain't rocket science" is a thing - it's damn hard, but so satisfying to be a part of. Another pro: the work/life balance is really reasonable (for the most part, I hear some departments are struggling a bit due to being understaffed). I have occasional bouts (maybe 2-3 weeks worth total over a year) where I put in 60-70 hour weeks, but by and large I'm working under 50 a week (probably average about 48). Other rocket companies (who are doing awesome work, too) have a bit of a reputation for grinding employees with consistently high hour work weeks. Extra pro: getting to be in a meeting with Jeff B who was reviewing the work your team was involved in was pretty neat :)