What was once good was disrupted by the private equity takeover, proceed with caution
Pros
The long-time employees (those that are left who have survived the layoffs) are excellent. Great people to work with, very knowledgeable and good team players. I still stay in touch with several people I worked with at Orbcomm. Having gone private from publicly traded, less focus on quarterly results, which can be good as there's no longer a quarter end fire drill for the most part.
Cons
When I was hired, pay was okay. Following several years of high inflation, salary fell well below even the average for the position and area of the country. The elimination of the employee stock purchase program along with other changes as a result of the private equity acquisition meant every employee lost future material compensation that was never replaced with in-kind cash raises. Ownership just pocketed the savings without passing any of that on to employees. In my opinion, the private equity takeover exposed a lot of the complacence that existed in the company prior that point. The issue was the new owners didn't actually do anything meaningful about it. They acquired the company at a pretty high valuation at the top of the 2021 tech stock price boom and probably have no subsequent chance to make back their money on the investment made. From my vantage point, inflation, the company carrying debt, and an inability by ownership to add more capital to the business has likely resulted in the cost cutting, cashflow suddenly being a bigger consideration, and downsizing through layoffs that have been seen in years since. The company has been going through major and minor reorganizations every 6 months on average since the acquisition. I went from working for the boss I was hired by, who was a major reason I wanted to work for Orbcomm, to reporting to several other different people. Some I got on with, others I didn't at all. I was told things would happen with my career and they never actually materialized. The company clearly thought they had leverage over me to keep me in exactly the same place with exactly the same pay indefinitely, so I fired them and am much happier at a different firm now. In my opinion, there is a mountain of what I would describe as technical debt. Unwinding it all is going to probably be expensive and unprofitable. In what was to me very puzzling moves, management saw seen fit to layoff some legacy employees who were the only people with real working knowledge about some of the legacy systems. The Orbcomm I went to work for pre-private equity era was a great place to work. It's a shame. I was really proud of how we all got through the pandemic.
