Joby Aviation Reviews

- Generally flexible about when and where you work - No layoffs from covid

Joby Aviation is an amazing place to work. Is is a young company with a huge heart, comprised of a world-class team that is vigorously clawing its way up a steep mountain to achieve a truly great purpose. That purpose is to provide an air taxi service that radically transforms peoples lives by giving them back their precious time while also helping heal our planet by reducing carbon emissions. Joby is much more of a tight-knit family competing in an all-terrain adventure race against the clock than it is a typical global aerospace company. From my observations, Joby is not for everyone. They require individuals who get excited about being responsible for producing a lot with a little. They require people who embrace decision making, ownership, hard work, and simply get excited about tackling hard problems… daily. People who have a passion for what Joby is doing and why they are doing it thrive in this fast-paced environment. Those that excel are doers, tenacious, amazingly resourceful, and uncanny in how they find ways to make progress and provide value, oftentimes with limited direction. They somehow put aside their ego and jump in with an eagerness to help wherever they can, sometimes below their pay grade and sometimes above. Competing in an all-terrain adventure race with limited course markings that requires you to collaborate with your teammates and push with everything you’ve got, and to do it in a ridiculously short amount of time, that is hard. That is crazy hard. And that is why I say it's not for everyone. If you have what it takes and can truly align with their culture and mission, then you will likely get a lot of fulfillment from working there. It will likely be one of the hardest places you’ve ever worked but also one of the most rewarding. As they race forward on commercializing their audaciously advanced and safety driven airplane, they are also building a new company in the process. And I can attest that it can get a little messy at times. The focus right now is to solve immense engineering challenges and get the vehicle certified so they can get into operations to provide a safe and reliable service. Successfully solving these complex and highly integrated engineering challenges is a masterful feat on its own. And to get such a system certified is not only incredibly difficult, but it is something even the FAA hasn’t seen before and is requiring immense collaboration to work through all of it. Joby's leadership team recognizes they have a 6 DOF rubrics cube in front of them and they know they don’t have everything figured out just yet. They build detailed plans to solve it all but not surprisingly, they don’t always go to plan. It is quite difficult to follow a path that doesn’t exist and understandably, this can frustrate those who have never worked in a highly developmental tech startup before. The leadership team is not perfect. Like all humans, there is room for improvement at all levels. But they are relentless in continually refining the plan while also adding incredible talent to help inform and execute to that plan. Even with these deficiencies and setbacks, their dogged determination drives them to forge on. They are relentless in their pursuit of their worthy goal and because of the amazing people they have on the inside and the outside, they believe they will succeed. And where do I stand amidst all of this? I too deeply believe we will succeed. I see issues with our plan and have my own skepticism at times. Where needed I raise my voice, speak out, and share my constructive solutions - something encouraged no matter what level you are at in the company. Will we find out our design has flaws and experience future setbacks? Yes. Will we breeze through the FAA certification process? No. But we will make it to the finish line, just watch us. For those who stick it out to the end, those covered in quarry dust and battle scars, we will stand atop the mountain of success wooting, high-fiving, and hugging the breadth out of each other. And to all those who believed and to those who did not, we will wave to you equally from atop that mountain. We will wave a joyful, happy wave of true genuine Joby love. But sadly, you will not see our wave because that mountain top is just too dang high! It is these special characteristics, the world-class team, the family-like culture, and the insane vision that formulate my belief on why Joby is an amazing place to work. We certainly have our issues but the positives are overwhelming and is what keeps me going, what keeps me putting my heart and soul into helping our team achieve our grandiose goals and mission. It is the journey and the destination that are too great to not be a part of.