Blue Origin reviews

3.2

46% would recommend to a friend

(1,210 total reviews)

Dave Limp

35% approve of CEO

40% positive business outlook

Blue Origin has an employee rating of 3.2 out of 5 stars, based on 1,210 company reviews on Glassdoor which indicates that most employees have a good working experience there. The Blue Origin employee rating is in line with the average (within 1 standard deviation) for employers within the Aerospace & Defense industry (3.6 stars).

Reviews by job title

1K reviews
2.0
Aug 16, 2020
Recommend
CEO approval
Business Outlook

Pros

Almost all great working-level colleagues all passionate about space, nearly unlimited funds if you can make the business case for it. Colleagues are eager to help in different business units without asking you for a chargeline. Projects in development related to Artemis Moon Landing are exciting and inspiring: BE-7, Blue Moon (Lunar Lander). While I was working it was great to be able to have your own purchase account to be able to order some much needed supplies costing less than $500 without needing multiple layers of approvals. If you have a great direct manager, they will enable you with much autonomy to be awesome (but not my personal experience)

Cons

Some managers who can make a really great chart with meaningless data are driving some really bad business decisions, especially in Operations sectors of the company. They honestly likely feel like they are helping but have no foresight as to what elements of these processes worked successfully, were just wasteful and others necessary (for certification) but also wasteful. I have no doubt both the positive and negative reviews on Glassdoor are true. Blue Origin's mission is truly extraordinary. Some good advice I can give to candidates further along the hiring process: Ask the hiring manager about rates of retention in their direct organization, ask if you are replacing anyone, ask if you can interview multiple employees if you do not get an interviewee lunch. I didn't listen to the red flags when I got hired on because I really wanted to work in the space sector and for Blue Origin, and that is on me. For example, when I asked my manager what his biggest challenges were for this year during the interviewee process he said "hiring people who do what they say they can do". Two weeks in, my manager is badmouthing previous employees for their current problems without looking inward. Keep in mind, these employees were not fired, but either reassigned or got a promotion elsewhere in the company. After a few months, it became clear they wanted "yes" men who could increase their bonuses for the short term but bad for long term. This is in spite of shared concerns you raise about quality of product and ultimately longer schedule delays to rework defects or in some cases, scrapped parts that already had about 3-6 months of work put into them. Ultimately I left for ethical reasons a little under a year of employment. I could probably have tried to stick out the year and move elsewhere in the company, but I wasn't confident enough with the exponential increase of executive management layers that this would not spread to other areas of Blue.

4.0
Aug 14, 2020

Fun startup aerospace company

Recommend
CEO approval
Business Outlook

Pros

Hands on approach to getting things done

Cons

Pay transparency and slowly loosing small company feel.

1.0
Aug 13, 2020
Recommend
CEO approval
Business Outlook

Pros

-Motivated, talented and passionate teammates -Exciting technology, exciting mission

Cons

-No incentive to perform. People routinely perform job scopes beyond their role, and management refuses to promote them regardless of how much work or time they put in to critical projects. No bonuses, no real equity, annual raises that barely match inflation, managers that fight you on promotions rather than advocating for you. -While internal advancement paths are essentially dead in the water, new leadership keeps getting pulled from "legacy" aerospace companies all the time. Week by week, the hierarchy just keeps getting fatter with managers whose contribution is questionable. -Not learning from mistakes. Multi page memos get written on lessons learned from a failed project, and then a new program gets stood up and proceeds to make the exact same mistakes. -Leadership says the right things but does the wrong things. Fool me once, shame on me, fool me 50 times I have no faith in management anymore. -Penny pinching on simple things like snacks because they are "too expensive" when company morale is at an all-time low -Combative processes that work against the end user instead of for them. Processes come from the top down, and management does not listen to the end users when they voice complaints. Blue Origin has everything on paper to enable success. Long term funding, a strong strategic vision, passionate employees on the ground level. Yet somehow, it has morphed into an incompetent, toxic trainwreck of an organization.

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Glassdoor has 1,385 Blue Origin reviews submitted anonymously by Blue Origin employees. Read employee reviews and ratings on Glassdoor to decide if Blue Origin is right for you.