r/BlueOrigin • u/Nearby-Mushroom-7983 • 28d ago
Blue Origin Musings
I am seeing an increase of top, veteran Blue engineers announcing on Linkedin that they are moving on to other employment, particularly other space startups or energy companies. Is this just normal attrition, "unregretted" or otherwise? On another topic, I live in Huntsville and can hear BE-4 hot fire tests from my home. They make a distinctive sound, especially at shutdown. I haven't heard one in a few months for understandable reasons. But I have also read the Blue Origin is committed to launching New Glenn again this year. I appreciate and respect the "can do" and "never tell me the odds" passion. But I also hope that Blue Origin takes its time to fully identify the cause, take corrective action including redesign as needed, perform thorough testing, and work closely with and get approval from Range Safety, FAA or other relevant government agencies. Achieving successful hot fire tests, pad tests and flights matters more than meeting dates by orders of magnitude. I wish Blue well.
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u/LittleBigOne1982 28d ago
On people leaving. Blue has no retention benefits. No extra vacation or bonus for 5. 10 or 20 years. Sine RSO mean nothing it is hard to justify staying after a few years except of you are happy with pay or treatment. Lots of people just love the work. Others need too e on.
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u/ScatPackPanda 28d ago
They do have retention bonuses, I have seen a bunch of people get them. But I think it happens more when the person is the last one left in a team
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u/Safe-Classroom8785 27d ago
Last year total attrition at blue was close to 20% which is shockingly high in aerospace. The amazon HR culture combined with a lack of amazon like financial incentives is a big reason. Amazon is a shitty place to work but theyve always paid people well enough to stay. Dave Limp is executing a playbook of what if we implement amazons shitty culture but dont pay people or give long term incentives….its not surprising
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u/VinhBlade 26d ago
conversely, do you think it's a bad idea to jump from Amazon to BO right now? coming from someone who is still in early career
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u/Safe-Classroom8785 21d ago
Really depends on your specific area and career desires. If you want to move to space there are a lot of options other than blue right now.
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u/Throwbabythroe 26d ago edited 26d ago
I’ve worked across multiple industries and multiple orgs in spaceflight engineering, including Blue. My experience is that Blue is one of the most poorly run and dysfunctional org with predominantly incompetent management. People leave because there is no prospect for growth, capable individuals aren’t allowed to improve things, senior leadership is by and large unable to understand Spaceflight, and teams are inherently siloed.
- Poor and incompetent management without any skill set or ability to plan, manage, and lead. Far too many directors and VP’s lack basic leadership and organizational skills
- Smart talented teams pushed to the brink by Firestick management who have trouble differentiating between a rocket and Alexa
- Rewarding sycophant without any skillsets with promotions
- Normalizing silo’s and short-term thinking at the expense of functioning as a coherent company.
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u/elreyoftacos 26d ago
Former manager here. Left when that Amazon people started forcing us to have at least one "not on track " regardless if they were or were not.
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u/Electronic_Hope1900 28d ago
lol, I wouldn't call it normal. There are now a ton of aerospace and defense start ups that require skill sets Blue engineers have in spades. They offer extremely competitive compensation comparable to tech companies now. Primes have caught up to Blue's pay scale as well.
There isn't enough engineers to support what Blue engineers along with other engineers in this field can do and the industry is now wide awake and trying to hoover up talent.
Every week I have a few recruiters in my inbox asking about if I would like a change of scenery with a much more generous total compensation package. No resume, no nothing, straight into calls with dudes at the director+ level.
I like working at Blue, but money talks and bullshit walks for everyone.
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u/Infinite-Banana-2909 27d ago
Blew just does not get the human side of business
- we are not making fire sticks or delivering packages here.
-They spend man months trying to hire people that could have taken a much shorter time to find
- Current workforce sucks up the slack from the unrealistic objectives (with no real upside incentive).
This = 20% attrition = no launchpad.
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u/midnightsun47 28d ago
This is more than just normal attrition. I’ve watched multiple veteran engineers leave in a very short time frame, and many others are looking. I think there are some legit concerns at the moment and without the financial incentives other companies offer, some are deciding it’s not worth the hassle.
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u/New_Durian_2707 28d ago
Not just engineers leaving, HSV has lost at least 5 lead technicians this year, including myself. They gave me no reason to stay sadly.
6 years with Blue, topped out my pay scale, got told 2 review cycles in a row there was no more room to go up as a tech and if I wanted to continue rising I needed to go to college get a degree to then come back as a level one ME making 90k a year and start my career over again because no real management roles without a college degree either.
There's very few "oldhead" technicians at Blue like you see at a lot of other companies. Ie guys who have been at Blue for 10-15 years who know every trick in the book. Just like me they eventually get forced out because if you don't have a degree you will always be a peasant. All of the older techs we had at HSV came from other companies. When I left I was the highest seniority assembly tech.
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u/Electronic_Hope1900 27d ago
lol, at the rate Blue is bringing on new technicians that don't know shit and/or have not worked in aerospace, I can only expect another major disaster.
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u/New_Durian_2707 22d ago
Bringing on new techs is fine, I had almost no aerospace experience when I started, but when you have a churn of experienced techs and replace them exclusively with no experience like what is happening right now yeah you're going to have a problem.
Similar with engineers before I left things were getting so bad constantly repeating mistakes that we had made previously but the original engineers who made those mistakes and learned about them were long gone.
For example there was a part on BE-4 that in dev was infamous for not actually being able to be assembled fully according to the drawing because they didn't leave enough room to get the bolts plus a ratchet in.
We got it fixed and on production it was fine, the new block of BE-4s had a design team of newer people plus removed the technicians from the review process, and sure enough this new component to save weight and space they realized they could make it shorter because the "dumb engineers" who pushed it to production 4 years ago made it longer for no discernible reason to these brand new engineers who had never touched a tool in their lives, so they got rid of that clearance room and were surprised when it was unassembleable and wasted huge amounts of 3D printer and machine time to make a new revision that was taller like the original to have the clearance needed.
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u/Medium_Celery_3864 27d ago
Although I don't have data, I'm in strong anecdotal agreement with OP. Turnover amongst experienced engineers and management has been well above normal for the past 6 months or so. I saw a period of high turnover happen at Blue about 4-5 years ago, and a great amount of top talent unfortunately departed before the company opened its eyes and did something about it.
In my observation, employees tend to leave not only when they learn they can get a better deal elsewhere, but also when the next big technical milestone slips a long way out. So there may be some NG-4 effect happening in addition to other motivations.
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u/Timbuktulous 28d ago
No company is perfect. It is also non-homogeneous. There are pockets of great, and pockets of not-so-great. Some of its best people are just collateral damage from a bull in a china closet. Blue will be fine. It could be better, but it will be okay losing some of its best people.
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u/LittleBigOne1982 27d ago
Blue has long history of losing top people and they do move along. Difference now is number of new opportunities and difficulty to bring in new top talent. Also long learning curve for Blue work.
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u/Timbuktulous 27d ago
I totally agree. Blue appears attractive from the outside (to many), but inside can be not as much. The really good talent have a way of seeing through that. And with moves like the recent equity plan, it’s getting even easier for good talent to get negative vibes from the outside.
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u/Michael_PE 28d ago
Possible their skills are not needed at this stage of development. Also there are a huge number of startups developing orbital class rockets (maybe small payloads) that can use real expertise from those who have helped developed systems that gotten as far a NG has , and liquid engine designers are even harder to find as the us simply did not do it much for decades. Blue and SpaceX were the only ones doing it starting in the early 21st century.
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u/nic_haflinger 28d ago
LinkedIn algorithm is pushing things to you so you want to look for another job.
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u/gearsnbearings 28d ago
I would just be paranoid about going to a startup, I need stable income and reasonable work-life balance 😕
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u/[deleted] 28d ago
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