Intern at Ispace - Structures Intern Ispace Employee Review

Exciting work - a great chance to gain experience in many aspects of a startup, from engineering, to project management, to business/strategy. Global mindset - we get to work with engineers from Luxembourg and Japan (and all over the world), very unusual in the space industry. Clear/inspiring vision and recent improvements in management - recent turnover was definitely for the better, company is trending upwards and deftly handling the transition from startup to scale-up.

Like others have said - a bit too lean. Many times you have to chart your own course and be OK working in ambiguity - it's not for everyone. As always, there is tension between employees and management, but not even close to the level of dysfunction I've seen at other startups.

They pay you competitively and have good benefits.

Leadership has zero clue what they're doing. No one in engineering or engineering leadership has ever built and flown a spacecraft before. When they hire people who do have that experience at the technical lead level(never the manager level, because then they'd have the power to actually change things), leadership doesn't listen to any of the suggestions they have or even remotely attempt to make correct programmatic or engineering decisions. Huge "sunk cost fallacy" rules programmatics here. Technical leads are never given any sort of design authority - everything is decided upon by managers who do not have the requisite technical background to be making those decisions. They regularly do "reorgs" and change people's job titles without talking to them. This is unacceptable and cowardly. Bad decisions never fall on leadership's heads - there is never any accountability. Instead, critical engineering staff are laid off and their roles/responsibilities are distributed to whoever is left, causing further attrition. Never any accountability at the managerial or executive level for making poor decisions that have run their single program into the ground.