[OhMeadhbh]

Blue Origin is a funny company. I worked for TerraBella/SkySat/Google Satellite, Planet Labs and Kubos, each as a consultant/contractor/whatever. I struck up a conversation w/ Rob Meyerson @ a conference and told him what I was working on (mostly comms / ground station work, but with a tiny bit of GNC test infrastructure.) I mean, I'm not God's gift to rocket scientists, but... I was pretty heavily recruited by them but was working at Amazon and didn't want to leave, then spent some time nursing a family member through cancer treatments. Finally I'm ready to talk to them and I start with back-channel chats to make sure they still have open reqs. They do so I informally talk about specific things I've done and what I might do at BO. Finally I put my resume together and submit it to the hiring manager I had been talking about, emphasizing the bits he said he was interested in. 15 minutes later I'm rejected for the position they had been recruiting me for.

I mean... I'm not a SUPER rocket engineer, but I'm pretty solid for the things I did work on. I've slogged through design meetings where I had to analyze protocol specs and make sure we agree'd on details, wrote code, wrote A LOT of tests. I mean, I'm solid. The only thing I can think is I don't have a Ph.D., but that DEFINITELY wasn't a requirement when Bob was running the shop.

Folk have told me it's evolved into something much more like Amazon where each team optimizes it's tiny bit and teams communicate only via APIs and the only opportunity you get to optimize complete functional or value chains is when something breaks.

Just seems a bit weird they went from "we're 10 guys in a hangar" to "we've re-implemented Amazon's small-team/local optimization religion" in less than 10 years and with less than 1/30-th of the number of engineers.

I wish them the best. I think SpaceX really needs some decent competition to focus their collective minds. But... they've gone weird.

I'm probably too senior and too "weird" to them to get hired there, but I absolutely encourage young engineers interested in an intense experience to check out their jobs page.

[Jach]

There's several funny stories of their hiring oddities on HN going back at least 10 years... For myself, I only talked to them about a back-end SWE role, not avionics, but they were the only company to ever ask about my college GPA. (Not good.)

[minetest2048]

You worked for Kubos? How is it? We were using KubOS the linux OS for our cubesats when they went bankrupt (?) and got acquired by someone else

[OhMeadhbh]

I really enjoyed working with the KubOS team (though I was more on the Major Tom side.) They were a great bunch -- everyone involved on the project has my highest recommendation.

I was definitely worried when I heard KubOS (the company) was struggling. I don't know too much about Xplore, but I think I saw Tyler was working there now, so there's SOME continuity at least.

KubOS (the codebase) doesn't look like it's received any love in the last couple of years, which is sort of sad. Some really bright people poured a lot of time and effort into it. Just looking at the contributors list: Ryan, Catherine, Kyle and Tim... all very bright people and a pleasure to work with.

[mannyv]

Was this before or after Limp joined?

[OhMeadhbh]

It was about two or three years ago for me. Not sure when Limp joined (actually... not sure who Limp is.) Oh wait... google is your friend... David Limp... new CEO... Looks like he joined in December 2023. So this was before that.

I overlapped with David at Amazon and had a few interactions with him and some of his direct reports. Don't know if that's good or bad; pretty sure I didn't embarrass myself there.