Astronautics Reviews in Milwaukee, WI Area

Pros

Challenging projects.
The opportunity to work on leading edge avoinics technology.
Salaries are competitive.
Employee benefits are competitive.
It is privately owned, meaning no dead weight is tolerated. It is my opinion that privately held companies are much more efficient at running a business.
Employees may have laptops.
Located in Milwaukee.

Cons

No organization is perfect, but here are some of the challenges:
Project management often seems reactive instead of proactive.
Communication between teams is poor or non existent.
Assignments may change without notice.
There is some inexperienced management on board.
There is no direct employee appreciation from supervisors. The company from a top level does provide incentives, recognition and awards, but this is not coming from the supervisors. I wonder if the supervisors have any idea what the engineers go through and contribute to the company. It may be that the definition of supervisor in this company is a little different.
Supervisors have no real say on many decisions.

Advice to Senior Management

There's been some organizational changes that helped alleviate some of the problems but still needs some refining.
Focus on cultivating talent, proactive management, improve communications, and simplify the process.
Try to get experienced managers on board.
This is easy for me to say but hey! I am not a manager, managers need to figure this out!

Pros

Good work experience
Meet new contacts for networking for future jobs
Some pay is better than no pay at all

Cons

The company is in a very bad neighborhood.
The management is very cheap in every way.
The company does not invest in its employees' professional development.
The company constantly lays people off and offers no severance pay. (I was laid off after a couple years there. I moved on to a much better company, which worked out very well for me.)

Advice to Senior Management

Move your headquarters out of the dangerous neighborhood.
Stop being so cheap.
Invest in your employees. The better you treat them, the more productive they will be.
Offer severance pay for the employees you let go. This will keep morale higher among the remaining employees.
Reward the productive employees with recognition as well as monetary incentives.

Pros

If you work at Astronautics, you will work with latest equipment in Avionics. You will work with very talented people on challenging projects.

Cons

Expectation is 50 hours/week -- overtime is unpaid for permanent employees. The customers are very demanding. The deadlines are short. People are working hard. Only a handful of people really know the complex avionics system.

Advice to Senior Management

Reward experienced employees. Cut back on consultants who don't have enough time to get up to speed. Invest in developing company talent.

Pros

My friend told me that some things have been written about Astronautics. When I looked online, I was a bit surprised. It's no wonder people always write negative things when they leave one company for another. I started at Astronautics 3 years ago and have had an amazing experience to date. I always receive support where I need it. I am getting an MBA which is 100% paid for by the company, plus I have been given opportunities to work as a team lead helping me to improve my management skills. It's great to know that when you're done with a project, you worked hard to get there along with your team members and that when you're flying in a commercial aircraft, your equipment is in the cockpit. I don't know about others, but that is pretty satisfying at the end of the day.

Cons

Yeah, the aerospace industry is subject to defense spending and we all know that commercial airlines don't like to spend a lot of money either. The fact that there have been layoffs is just the nature of the industry - we aren't the only company experiencing this. Look at Lockheed Martin and Boeing - they are shutting down their facilities left and right.... Not only that, the industry poses some really strict standards and deadlines. If you don't like to work hard, then don't work in the aerospace industry - because there will always be overtime work, etc.

Advice to Senior Management

Keep up the good work. I know you're all dealing with some hard demands from our customers and you are doing a great job keeping everybody on track and working hard.

Pros

Your opinions are valued and heard in this mid-sized company. Open door policy allows you to sit down face to face with the President of the company. The founder of the company is also available for conversations. Company meetings share information with employees. Everyone says hi to each other in the hallways. Casual environment-everyone gets along well.

Cons

benefits are not as high as with larger companies.

Advice to Senior Management

grow employees-those who are passionate about doing a good job.

Pros

A paycheck is better than starving.

Cons

Upper management are clueless, especially about how to manage medium to large-sized software projects. They apparently have no interest in finding out about industry-standard practices or how successful companies do it.

Bad company culture. Outdated blue-collar management style, An unhealthy micro-management mentality pervades the whole company and apparently comes from the top down. If somethings broken they only know to just throw more rules and more micromanagement at it rather than how to actually fix it.

Management repeatedly cause massive rework by continually messing with the development process and unnecessarily moving software parts between engineers, often right before a delivery is due. They always agree to very unrealistic delivery dates with the customer, and allow the customer to change their requirements whenever they want. Then to fix these mistakes and bail the company out they demand the software engineers work more than 10 extra hours of overtime per week for months on end, totally unpaid and unrewarded, not even with equivalent time off later. The worst is, management then go and make exactly the same stupid mistakes right over again.

Upper management place no value in their non-managerial employees:

The company refuse to consider any modern or innovative ways of working like telecommuting, just because of a paranoid and undeserved lack of trust in their employees.

Cheapskate benefits package is uncompetitive with other companies offerings.

The company has no real commitment to provide or even pay for training for staff to allow them to develop new skills useful to the company or even keep their existing professional skills current.

There is little to no chance of real career progression unless you sit in the office 80 hours every week and act busy, regardless of how skilled or productive you actually are.

Advice to Senior Management

Really fix all the items above, not just talk or make token gestures.
Completely overhaul the old-school mentality and stale corporate culture at ACA. Implement a mechanism to detect and move out ineffective managers in all departments and at all levels, especailly the highest.

Instead of repeatedly trying and failing to invent a process from scratch, look at how successful software companies run large development projects and emulate them. Hint: consider other strategies that can also fit DO178 other than "waterfall", which always has been recognized as the most unrealistic/unworkable model by nearly all smart software companies.

Treat employees with more respect. Learn why it is not ok to just flat out demand instead of ask people to work massive overtime, and learn why not giving anything tangible back when they do actually hurts the company more than it costs.

Educate the president enough for him to realize why judging professional employees productivity just by noting whether their cars are in the car park at 7am is ridiculous.

Fix the most dehumanizing and illogical company rules like the one where legitimately sick employees can be penalized on their annual review or even fired for taking 3+ single days sick just because they were less than 3 months apart.

Pros

You might get to do new things and work with interesting hardware.

Cons

The SW design process is hosed. They lay people off like there's no tomorrow and then have company meetings where they talk about how they are a 'family company'. The headquarters building is in an unsafe neighborhood and the A/C is insufficient for weeks at a time every year. A bullet went through the 3rd floor window one night and people would occasionally get robbed walking to lunch, that's how bad it is. The yearly bonus, retirement plan, and health savings plan are all mediocre at best.

Advice to Senior Management

Think about more than just squeezing money out of the company.

Pros

Good learing experience with lots of technologies to study and gain experience. Very laid back not too much pressure on employees.

Cons

Very bad area to work in, and its been tough for the part several years, but hopefully things will get better.

Advice to Senior Management

Relocations is hufe factor in attracting new employees since a lot of people turn down positions once they see the area.

Pros

The pros? Well, I did make some very good friendships here with a bunch of the employees. I will keep those friendships.

Cons

Where can I start? First, can we find someone in management that has a clue? OK, one of the higher managers said that so what, we can send out a part with 300 defects. They customer knows sometime in the future we will fix them. Nice. On top of that, no way to advance, and all the younger kids out of college who have NO CLUE are put in lead positions. Why? Cause they are CHEAP. It's really a place you will not believe. They just went and in a cowardly manner laid off 70+ employees, and aren't done. The senior leadership, aka, Zelazo, Russek, and co, saying our money is good, we will get some new contracts, blah blah blah. Nothing. Software people twiddling their thumbs at their desks. So then what? Huge layoff with no warning, and NO SEVERENCE. Talk about being scumbags. The product we are giving Airbus is a piece of garbage, and management goes around like uhhh, uhhh, well, we are working with our customer. If I were Airbus, I'd fire us now. Get a real company to make this communications product. I mean, please, the benefits suck, the 401K sucks, and the raises suck. Why did I work here? Cause I thought the place was a steady income. It is a breeze to do your job here, and reviews are a cakewalk, but after all these people got laid off, well, hey, now it really really sucks. Morale is in the toilet, and many employees there have taken up smoking. I think that Astro should be blamed for new cases of lung cancer. Or alcohol abuse. They definitely need a stronger mental health policy. But then, why when the lunatics run the asylum???

Advice to Senior Management

First things first.. to management: QUIT! Seriously. These guys couldn't run a Burger King. Talk about the Keystone Cops running around, always in meetings, getting schooled by the customers, and just plain, well, stupid. You bring up software process to them, and they are like, what? They don't know how to conduct software reviews, nor do they know how to use the tools they have. If you're smart, just shut up. They refuse to accept intelligence. All the leads are kids, and even the architect team is full of young people. Again, cause they are CHEAP. The architect team has had over a year to get a decent spec out... and they put out basically 1/2 a system, with loads of holes. Again, management, QUIT. As for Zelazo, he's an ascot wearing putz who is a blatent coward for laying off all of those great people. Anyone who was competent is out. The dregs are left. Russek, just a cheapo as well. The senior leadership met offsite in order to plan the layoffs, then no severence. Talk about a bunch of scumbags. Again, QUIT.

Pros

Astronautics provided a good opportunity to work on systems for the aerospace industry. Astronautics also provided a good place to learn about software development on modern real-time operating systems (RTOS).

Cons

Astronautics to me was just a place to work. There was not much of a sense of teamwork or helping each other. Part of the problem was a large expansion of new college grads who didn't like the job or each other. Astronautics also had a problem with employee retention, most people seemed to leave after a few months. This also didn't help with having a solid team oriented workplace.

Advice to Senior Management

Help the new hires to care more about the company otherwise it will just be a place to work.