Astronautics Reviews

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

The company provide fair benefit, nice people and leading in the flight bag technology, there is nothing the engineers can't do.

Cons

The high management is acting very poor, lack of management knowledge.
Don't know to value employees contribution, do not support new employees with training therefore many new employees are leaving the company frustrated and disappointed. it is the company policy not to send employees for professional training.
The founder of the company create great company with great management unfortunately the second generation does not know what management is therefore the current company poor financing situation. this company have no future with the current management.

Advice to Senior Management

Go and learn what good management is, act in open minded and support your employees.
A manager should present leadership that inspire his directs "after me".
When you learn to accept your mistakes then you will be able lead the company. let the young blood to lead and get read the no' 2 (purchasing)

Pros

- Work on high tech products
- Ability to advance quickly and take on greater responsibility
- Relaxed environment with friendly people

Cons

- Poorly managed large projects have reduced employee morale
- Lack of communication between disciplines
- Engineering and Manufacturing are not in the same location

Advice to Senior Management

Create positions where project engineers are focused on tracking and maintaining the schedule for large projects. Have employees focus on either project management or technical design, but not both.

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

When I worked at Astronautics I was doing some exciting things. The people I worked with were great and I definitely felt that I was working on some really advanced project. How many people can say they worked on products for the new Boeing 787 and the new Airbus A400M!

Cons

Yes, I must admit that working overtime wasn’t always the most pleasant experience, but it happens. When I did have to work overtime at least management did the best to help us out and provided us food when we had to work late! What do you expect when you are supporting customers (worldwide mind you) doing technologically advanced things!

Advice to Senior Management

I had a great experience working at Astronautics. Of course It is a shame that people have to be laid off but if you look at the news, the economy isn’t exactly doing great. In fact, if you look at the Aerospace industry in general you will notice that Astronautics isn’t the only one going this route!

Pros

Astronautics gives new grads a chance to gain actual work experience. If you can tolerate the extreme micromanagement, it can be a chance to learn the basics of the avionics field. Always a challenge to satisfy the customers. Many of the people working for this company are forward thinkers and a real pleasure to work with.

Cons

Astronautics is a company in trouble. After implementing a company wide IFS (resource planning)
software program that was never intended for an engineering environment. The engineering management has lost control of there departments, to production management. Upper management is totally ineffective. Middle management practice extreme micromanagement, Managers with little or no technical background are making design decisions that are costing this
company millions in redesign cost. Many of the engineers are expecting a meltdown in the not to distant future.

Advice to Senior Management

Resource planning software works for production, but is a handcuff to engineering, also production managers do not have the faintest idea how to run an engineering department. When you hire someone to do a job, let them do it. Ron Zelazo is an absentee ceo spending all his time
in New Jersey.

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.