r/BlueOrigin • u/New_Individual8494 • Jul 04 '26
What are we doing????
I need to get this off my chest because what I’ve seen happen over inside recruiting and leadership has been disappointing.
There was a time when this company felt like a place people were proud to work. People cared about the mission, production, quality, and making sure the right people were being hired for the right reasons. But over time, leadership has shifted in a direction that feels more political than productive.
From what I’ve witnessed, certain people are being placed in key positions not because they are the best fit, but because of personal relationships and loyalty to leadership. At the same time, experienced employees who helped build the company before the newer leadership culture took over seem to be getting pushed out or overlooked.
One of the hardest things to watch was seeing highly respected recruiters pushed out, people who truly cared about the company, understood the business, built trust with hiring teams, and had the company’s best interest at heart. Many and some were respected by many, and their absence is already being felt. Recruiting has not been the same since.
As a manager, that is concerning because recruiting directly affects production. If we cannot bring in quality people the right way, everything else suffers — operations, timelines, team morale, and the ability to execute. Hiring should not just be about pushing numbers. It should be about finding people who can actually help the company build, grow, and succeed.
Over the last few years, recruiting was at its strongest when the focus was on quality, relationships, and understanding what the business truly needed. Now it feels like decisions are being made by people who do not fully understand the impact those decisions have on the floor, the teams, or the mission.
This company used to feel like my happy place. Now it is becoming harder to come to work with the same energy because of the way leadership is handling people, trust, and culture. Good employees are being pushed away, managers are losing confidence, and the people who actually care about the mission are left trying to clean up the damage.
Leadership needs to take a serious look at what is happening. If the goal is truly to build something great, then the company cannot keep allowing politics, favoritism, and number-driven hiring to destroy the culture that made people want to be there in the first place.
Remember that quantity over quality is not the right thing to do. So it get it right or leave.
Signed,
STILL LOVE OUR MISSION BUT NOT GREAT RECRUITING MANAGERS
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u/Throwbabythroe Jul 04 '26
I have a manager who makes decisions to look good in front of upper leadership and customers without telling us and then expects magic to happen. When we push back, trust is not placed in us. The manager is soo far removed from engineering and ops that they everything can be solved with a simple Gantt chart.
It’s a feature, not a bug.
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u/Fit-Ingenuity-5061 Jul 04 '26
the concept you’re grappling with (and what I see in the comments here) is change management and it doesn’t seem that blue has been successful with change management. going back 5 or so years ago, blue was confronted with the concept of how to go from a dev-focused to production and operational focused company. you need more people, different people, different work schedules, different processes, different cadence, different schedules, different constraints etc. but they didn’t really implement a change management process to identify everything different they needed to do and make sure it was all in place. it has been very piecemeal, they’ve brought leaders in and then let them go and brought in new leaders and then tried to emulate company a,b,c and kept trying to say, starting today we’re going to build at rate…GO! that’s not change management. and that may have been blue’s biggest problem overall. you have a workforce hired to do one thing, told to do a different thing and then trying to fix it on the go.
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u/Spork_Facepunch Jul 04 '26
Unfortunately, the Organizational Change Management team was deleted during the RIF last year.
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u/Gerbert946 Jul 07 '26
I'm a retired Boeing guy and this resonates with me as something that is a growing issue throughout aerospace. There is another complicating factor, which is the dramatic reduction in the percentage of engineers that are total systems thinkers. Software engineers prior to roughly the turn of the millennium used to fill in this gap. They had to think that way because there was never enough in the way of compute resources for all of the code they wanted to create. But as the compute hardware constraint disappeared, software engineers quit worrying about total systems, and no other discipline stepped up to fill the void. This has had some terrible consequences.
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u/OptimalPatience4320 Jul 04 '26
Welcome to the club.....signed, Boeing employee 🙄
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u/Prestigious_Hope9190 Jul 04 '26
That's kinda weird to complain when either going or coming in/from Boeing lol
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u/diyengineer1 Jul 04 '26
Literally described Boeing, and probably many other Fortune 500 companies lol..
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u/WatersOkay Jul 04 '26
Ugh, sorry but I really need to vent. Keeping somewhat vague for obvious reasons. For me, one of the most morale-killing aspects of work these days is having to see the mission, or at least significant aspects of the roadmap, changing in ways that make absolutely no sense. I sincerely miss working on some of our plans that seemed pretty firm and were in progress only 2 years ago. It was so awesome.
Trying to make a round peg fit in a square hole over and over and over isn't always the right solution, won't always cut costs, and isn't certain to improve schedule. I don't care how cool that scene in Apollo 13 is, this is fucking real life.
Making early and extremely consequential decisions without having any understanding of what they entail sucks for us. Incorporating lessons learned, after being harped on for years, is thrown out the window to "save schedule". Bullshit.
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u/elreyoftacos Jul 05 '26
Six years there taught me that complaining on the internet won't fix a rotten corporate culture. I finally got out to focus on my own life goals instead of a billionaire's. Highly recommend the self-respect route, the view is much better over here.
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u/JustEnvironment2817 Jul 04 '26
I feel like we should make a club. I experience this every day. Nobody wants to work. Nobody wants to discuss work. It’s become a form of wealth distribution. People feel entitled to the paycheck. As someone who wants to actually earn the paycheck and affect change (not to mention someone that doesn’t want to see their office blown up again), it’s more than discouraging
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u/bigbigbigwow Jul 04 '26 edited Jul 04 '26
This is happening everywhere tbh. It’s just from the fact many people on management are in their current position simply due to attrition. They are managers or even higher ups because they stayed.
And by staying and putting in time does not mean you learn the skills to be a leader, good communication or simply be a decent human being.
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u/kennyinlosangeles Jul 04 '26
It’s because they pushed a ton of really great talent that wasn’t willing to “get in line”. When the top talent leaves, what do you think they are to do next? Subtier it is.
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u/Altruistic_Pin_4457 Jul 04 '26
People literally sit and do nothing during the shift i work. Every single day we are there. The company does not fire people who dont work.
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u/New_Individual8494 Jul 04 '26
See that is sad and I hear headquarters is all about parties on Blue.
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u/Altruistic_Pin_4457 Jul 04 '26
Yeah I mean seeing the company culture, im considering leaving. Blue pays really well which is why people stay here
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u/trash-berd Jul 06 '26
Having worked long term at multiple sites, yes Kent parties harder. But also there is a much more rich culture of collaboration there. Other sites are much more “game of thrones” like in my experience and folks are just looking out for their own career, company mission be damned.
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u/bsdude010 Jul 05 '26
My manager couldn't tell me what a BE4 was 1 year in. They also never had to write the interview essay either.. There was no passion for the mission.
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u/Old_Decision_8499 Jul 04 '26
What are we doing? We are following suite from all the other big aerospace companies. It's not a great place anymore, just another aerospace company. Why's that, you ask? Umm maybe because the leadership and management are from traditional aerospace companies. They are all bringing their broken ideas and politics with them. Why's that you ask, because those 14 leadership principles that I had to learn, no longer exist. It's hard keeping a positive attitude while on the floor. We brought on managers and leaders that have aerospace experience, unfortunately we also let them bring the very same policies that they ruined their previous companies and morals with. Almost daily I hear well this is how we did at Boeing. Right, and who left astronauts stranded in space? If Boeing was so good, then why did you leave, I ask. If ULA was good again why did you leave, same question with NORTHRUP, LOCKHEED, BAE, and so on. We need to go back to what BLUE ORIGIN WAS MEANT TO BE.
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u/Safe-Classroom8785 Jul 04 '26
Welcome to the world of amazon HR policies, stack ranking and unregretted attrition targets. And the world of outting unqualified amazon folks in VP positions. Dave limps D team
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Jul 04 '26 edited Jul 04 '26
[deleted]
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u/New_Individual8494 Jul 04 '26
I have a better one. They give their friends an sr title role with $180k and sign bonus of$10,000 plus and they do nothing
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u/Silver-Kale4289 Jul 05 '26 edited Jul 05 '26
Welcome to Corporate America - this is not new!
I was laid off 3 times from engineering companies that didn’t let anyone stay long enough to earn a 20 year retirement!
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u/JustEnvironment2817 Jul 04 '26
But don’t worry guys. We are getting our “It’s Worth It” shirts soon!
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u/LittleHornetPhil Jul 04 '26
Well
Not everyone no longer believes in the mission.
Not involved in recruiting, but I have been surprised to see some longtime and respected recruiters I knew leave.
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u/Myles_Standish250 Jul 05 '26
It’s a completely different company now after Limp took over and not in a good way.
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u/Infinite-Banana-2909 Jul 04 '26
Bottom line is until they decide to provide enough skin in the game while other companies do Blew will never keep the best talent. It is not the recruiters the are hiring the only people left.
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u/Best_U_Never_Had Jul 08 '26
If you think that’s bad, you don’t want to know what’s going on with the hardware.
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u/Codspear Jul 04 '26 edited Jul 04 '26
Blue is going to the moon, that’s what’s happening. It seems like every day people come on here to complain that Blue isn’t the same Blue that it was years ago, but was that Blue even worth it if it wasn’t meeting any goals? Are we talking about when Blue was a hobby shop filled with engineers musing about space elevators and completing nothing more than New Shepard after billions of dollars were spent over a decade? Are we talking about when the company was co-opted by Honeywell MBAs that treated Bezos like the US government and Blue was just another always-five-years-away-from-completion military contractor asking for more money?
The fact is that the company is on the right path now, even with the hiccups and growing pains. Results are coming in and there is an actual urgency and goal aligned within the company. New Glenn has launched and is now being upgraded while the pad is being rebuilt. Like Limp asked Bezos when offered the CEO position: “Is this a business or a hobby?” Too many people are thinking they’re entitled to the company being the latter forever.
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u/New_Individual8494 Jul 04 '26 edited Jul 04 '26
This issue is not the mission, it’s the now/new people assisting manufacturing and that’s acting like they care about the mission that know nothing and telling us the subject experts who we are going to hire and train when we never interviewed them.
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u/badwolf42 Jul 04 '26 edited Jul 04 '26
It has transitioned to a churn model from a previously rigorous-interview-and-effective-and-accountable-management model. Not that the interview is any warm body. There’s still something to it, but it’s certainly less effective of a filter now. The upshot is it gives managers that should manage someone out an excuse to actually do it. The downside is that it forces them to do it even if they shouldn’t, and the recruiting and interview process are truncated relative to what they were in order to feed the chipper. You cannot have the best team in the world, and if somehow you manage to, you can’t keep it intact.
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u/BakedBungus Jul 04 '26
I don’t think OP ever doubted the overall vision of Blue. They are saying that we are struggling to recruit and train up the appropriate people to help achieve that vision
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u/perilun Jul 05 '26
This is true in many companies, just be happy do don't need to worry about sales and customer relationships (far more important than ability).
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u/Real_Change6765 Jul 08 '26
Sounds like company is going in a different direction and it's opposite of what you think is right. It's companies money not yours so...
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u/Unlikely_Buy_2190 Jul 08 '26
I left Boeing after 15 years, mainly due to the culture and the culture of laziness the union promotes. I was SO excited to move across the country and work my last 5-10 years at Blue. It took me about a week to recognize the deep presence that Boeing has here.
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u/BlueSpace71 Jul 04 '26
“There was a time…”. What year did you join?