Blue Will Succeed Despite Itself - Manufacturing Engineer Blue Origin Employee Review

3.0
5 Mar 2021
Recommend
CEO approval
Business outlook

Pros

The company is well funded, which is a huge benefit in the aerospace industry. While competitors are more beholden to investors or government contracts, Blue is more robust to political changes. This enables product teams to work to completion while others may run out of funding or kill projects based on new administration priorities. There have been many opportunities to grow professionally at Blue because there is so much work to be done. The lack of pre-defined career paths can actually be beneficial for individuals who want to explore different roles (assuming they can find bandwidth to take on that additional work). I prefer this flexibility compared to more well-defined structures. Put simply, Blue Origin does cool things. The company is relatively open internally, so curious individuals can learn what's going on across the board by exploring the internal wiki pages. I believe in the long-term Blue will be successful in "building the road to space" and it's exciting to be a part of that work.

Cons

Prioritization of work is very reactionary and rarely data-based. Edicts flow down from the CEO frequently, which causes a lot of churn and leads to lack of completion for what used to be the "top priority". The response from leadership is that workers need to be better at doing what they say, which is a disappointing conclusion to make. There is lack of ownership by top level management on the direct impact that frequent shifts in direction have on the ability to make progress quickly. The organization follows a fairly strict hierarchy. Delegation and accountability aren't very well established (outside of spending/purchasing, which is well defined). This leads to difficulty in decision making when individuals don't believe they have the authority to approve, leading to re-explanation and rubber-stamping from upper management without any value-added review. This is likely a common problem with hierarchical companies, but I think this has a more stark impact given the rapid growth of Blue in the last 5 years combined with the number of decisions needed to effectively scale the company. There is a lack of clear vision for how to get Blue to its goal of "millions of people living and working in space". That vision needs to include the prioritization of initiatives (discussed earlier). The vision also needs to identify what is differentiating technology for the company that we should innovate in-house. The confusion between "make it here" and "find a third party" results in half-hearted efforts to build critical infrastructure (mainly enterprise systems), which has significant impacts on the ability of individuals to complete their work efficiently.

Explore other reviews about Blue Origin

5.0
3 Jun 2026
Recommend
CEO approval
Business outlook

Pros

Good team to work with. No complaints.

Cons

No cons at this point.

1.0
5 Jun 2026
Recommend
CEO approval
Business outlook

Pros

Free cheese and yogurt. Some people are nice others will make sure you fail

Cons

No equity unless you like monopoly money. No IPO for Blue ever and liquidity events are just bonus event. No work life balance. Toxic leadership who do not care about but will lie to you as long as you serve their own purpose. Everyone is looking, DO NOT come here!!! You will lose years of your life stressed out, frustrated and nothing but an average salary to show for. There are better places out there for space work

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