Good people, Confused Management, and Growing Pains
Pros
Honeybee Robotics provides employees with a good amount of opportunity to work on meaningful aerospace R&D programs and work with some of the best minds in science and engineering in the space exploration world. The working environment is fast paced and engineers are able to own entire portions of a system from initial concept generation through designing, building, testing, and operating planetary exploration tools. You can sometimes get bogged down in specific repetitive aspects of the process, but you usually get a lot of experience across the board. Most of the employees are friendly and easy to get along with. There are plenty of talented engineers, technicians, and analysts in the Pasadena office. The team has more than doubled in size in recent years so business growth is good (but it can be a bit too fast in some cases).
Cons
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.
