Honeybee Robotics Reviews

Growing pains have hit the Pasadena office (and Honeybee as a whole) in the last year or so. Rapid growth and acquisition by Ensign-Bickford in 2017 have changed the company atmosphere and have caused some confusion on company direction. As a result, the organization has gotten less agile and less able to complete tasks quickly. Some of the issues here are: -Extremely out of touch corporate management that suffers from limited vision and a one-size-fits-all business attitude that is unfriendly to employees. -Project timelines are usually unreasonable, often for no apparent reason leading to late or rushed deliverables -Small business that is always at the mercy of NASA program/budget volatility (cancellations, descoping, etc.) -Local management is generally not present or otherwise too busy to handle day to day issues -Many employees do not contribute adequately, leaving work improperly distributed, and other employees have to work crazy hours to make up for that. A few employees could be deemed actively malicious on this front. -HR is unresponsive and there are frequently payroll mistakes/issues that are not immediately remedied -Insufficient IT resources to get things done quickly -Rampant under staffing. This often causes people to jump in and out of projects rapidly with no ability to focus. -Most of the work force comes in with little prior experience and there are few resources for training and learning how to do things right -Most internal processes and procedures that are needed to work in spaceflight are dated, vague, or otherwise unhelpful -NY, CA, and CO sites are very siloed and have minimal interaction even when it would be immensely helpful.

Engineers are consistently being asked to give more to this company which frankly is giving us less and less. We're expected to work 10-12 hour days but don't get bonuses despite the company having record revenue the past few years. We're constantly fighting fires with no end or help in sight - there has no little no hiring the last 6 months, and the projects keep piling up. As a result, burnout is a common sentiment around the office. It doesn't help that the salary is at least 10k less than what other aerospace companies offer, and the company did close to nothing to help employees during the pandemic - we were actually incentivized employees to come into the office during the height. In fact, there's no consideration for making sure people stay distanced while working on projects, and senior project managers take advantage of the fact that their work allows them to work from home, so they require engineers to go in more often to do the hands-on-work. The assumption is that since we're all passionate about what we do, there's no need to pay us fairly or expect us to have a work/life balance.