About as Incompetent as It Gets - Engineer ABL Space Systems Employee Review

ABL may take the cake for most wasted potential in aerospace history. They have a unique business model that relies only on proven technology: rapid launch capability independent of launch location. There is clearly a plethora of market interest, given the sum of contracts ABL acquired even before their first launch. With such simplicity and demand, success seemed certain. However, abhorrent management, leadership, and hiring practices cratered any chance for success harder than their first launch cratered the launch pad. Don't be fooled by the recent surge of 5 star reviews by current employees. An astute reader could piece together why they may have suddenly appeared. These reviews can be entirely disregarded. Instead focus on the common themes among the poor reviews by former employees, which I will reinforce here. There are a few employees in the CEO’s circle who can do no wrong. Any disagreement with these individuals, no matter how amicable or rationale, will result in “blacklisting” by the CEO. The reason is that he uses these individuals as proxies for his ideas. With a fraction of the necessary background information, he’ll instruct them to take actions in areas well outside their wheelhouses. Any attempt to push back on these individuals, such as suggesting alternate paths forward, is futile. They're simply drones following orders and will be sure to report back to the CEO that you made their job difficult. You'll find more realism in a Fast and Furious film than in an ABL schedule. Continually launching “in 3 months” resulted in years of horrible short term engineering decisions. Shortcuts are taken at every turn to meet these fake schedules, resulting in (predictably) insurmountable errors and seemingly infinite delays. The fake schedule for flight 1 was outdone only by the downright laughable schedule for flight 2, which was advertised as "more realistic" by the CEO. He might argue that the flight 1 failure resulted in a shift in flight 2 schedule, but any “realistic" schedule should have anticipated a flight 1 failure, since no American commercial launch provider has had a successful first launch. Management is infiltrated with low-end talent who would struggle to pass for level 2 engineers at most other aerospace companies. Engineers are also quite incompetent aside from a few truly effective individuals. This latter group dwindles by the day as they find greener and saner pastures elsewhere. ABL is unable to secure even moderate talent, with most candidates seeing through the interviewers' ruse. Management compensates for their inadequacy by throwing their reports under the bus at the earliest opportunity. A manager will tell a report to take a certain path without considering that report’s input. When that path proves to be incorrect, the manager will blame the report in discussions with upper management. I could go on for hundreds more paragraphs, but I feel it would strain the reader’s attention. All in all, ABL is the most backwards company I've worked at. Management is only adept at making employees feel like they are the problem. However, as outlined above, management is the root cause for almost all of ABL’s failures. Though I left on good terms, I would not entertain working there again. No title or salary is worth my sanity.