Pros
As an engineer - Work is exciting, and at a fast pace. You can expect to truly own your work. It's an awesome feeling seeing something you own work on-orbit. Also, York's satellites are reliable... you'll get valuable experience with functional satellites that work. - You will learn a ton, especially in lower-level engineering positions. - Work happens at all stages of the engineering life cycle. You will be involved with conceptualizing new designs while also being on console for mission operations. - Good work life balance. Generally actually 9-5 with occasional long weeks. Good PTO mitigates the occasional longer hours. As an employee - Paid healthcare is nice. Paid public transit pass is also nice. - The company is actively scaling production capacity. It's an exciting and rare change to see scaling in action. - There is very little corporate BS, few useless meetings. York has (recently) improved on processes to make sure things continue getting faster. - Being involved with the Colorado Rockies is a cool perk. Cool events, merch, game perks, etc. In summary, being at York, especially now, opens a lot of great opportunities to own technical work at a growing company that makes things that work.
Cons
Leadership treats themselves while isolating employees - Leadership is isolated from employees. Technical business decisions are made by non-technical people with little to no technical input. - Communication is generally lacking internally. You often find out about big company news (new contracts, IPO, etc) from external news articles. - Generally, leadership is compensated well while employees are compensated very stingily. This makes employees easily feel undervalued despite being heavy lifters for technical success. - York is not (yet) a recognizable brand. This is improving but don't expect friends and family to ooh and aah at the name. Employee life - There are no equity opportunities for employees. The compensation structure feels like a private equity shill operation (in fact, York is owned by a private equity firm). - There are very few women in engineering groups. The culture is pretty bro-y. - York will not pay for your higher education degree (they claim it's useless). - People leave all the time. The company has historically dealt with turnover well, and there aren't signs of changing. It's a negative feedback loop that drives retention down. - 5 days in office for most teams. We used to have 9/80 fridays but those seem to be gone.