General Atomics reviews

- Extremely High Turnover in the Space Program - Salary Exempt employees are taken advantage of and overworked. It is expected to work 50 hours/week and it is common to work over 60 hours. You will work several weekends to support the project or to get ahead on your work. I have personally been notified to work the weekend on Friday afternoon. - Frustrating work environment, document control is a nightmare, and accountability is nonexistent - Salary cannot compete with other companies in the industry. Annual compensation is lower than inflation rate even if you receive high marks for your review - Benefits are subpar at best. GA tries to justify their benefits package with a pension instead of providing a competitive match to the 401k package. Medical benefits are okay, they have been trimmed down to save the company money since the pandemic. Education benefits are not competitive compared to other companies. - Professional development is lacking. New Engineers are forced to learn everything on their own without mentorship or training. Management is not provided formal training. Industry common practices such as Six Sigma/Lean are nonexistent. Training assigned on the company website is an absolute joke intended for checking boxes, and some training assigned is outdated or not relevant to your job duties - Toxic Leadership that starts at the top of the food chain and makes it way to the upper and lower management. Managers are not formally trained so you get a medley of leadership styles that can possibly lower the team’s morale. The President of GA-EMS is stuck in the past and does not budge on certain flexibility such as WFH, 9/80, or giving overworked employees slack. Not the best place to grow as a manager. GA has lost contracts with a well-known government space organization due to managers conflicting with the customer and even yelling at the customer during a meeting, slamming phones while hanging up and other unprofessional behavior. GA almost got blacklisted from the well-known organization…you cannot make this stuff up - Personally encountered Project Managers gossiping about subordinates on the project, even saying it to their face in an unprofessional and disrespectful manner. Turnover was so bad that Neil Blue (GA CEO) flew out on his private jet and attempted some damage control - Dishonest company to customers and employees, get everything in writing or do not believe it at all

GA is an incredibly top-heavy hierarchical organization, with limited pay, benefits, and intellectual capital left over for support staff and junior level employees, coupled with a severely limited power to make change for managers. A lot of these reviews say people never leave GA- and it's true - if you bought a home in San Diego in the 80's when it was possible on earned wages, then you can afford stick around. If you're a new hire, good luck making enough to ever stop renting. Most departments are grey and tenured up to the point of being unhealthy - GA doesn't fire even very poor performers, so you can expect about a third of the workforce here to be completely ineffectual. And you'd think with such a seasoned (some might say salty) workforce, you think we'd be great at planning ahead. Nope. It's not just a lack of long term strategy, it's a failure in basic empathy. Management demanded the staff return to the office four days a week, with some managers demanding full in-office. This has resulted in a 50%+ turnover in some departments - especially IT, facilities, HR (and you can infer further- it wasn't the worst performers that left). Wages have stayed stuck at pre pandemic levels even after 10-20% wage inflation in some sectors. Simply put, GA is no longer a competitive employer post-COVID. Raises at GA are on a strictly annual basis regardless of performance or changes in job title, and even with 5% inflation, most people will be lucky to see 3% increases. GA has an adequate benefits package, but wages themselves are completely insufficient to cover the soaring cost of living in San Diego, so it's no surprise staffing is suffering so much. The results for productivity are clear - it takes several months right now for a new hire to get a computer because of shortages in ITS. Hired as an engineer? Hope you can work a slide rule. Purchasing similarly takes upwards of a month to make most decisions, and that's after the 5 managers you need to buy even a $5000 widget sign off on the purchase. Facilities tickets? Good luck. They still haven't cut a guy in my group a key to his office, and there's a 6 month old outstanding request to get it done. And now, as an outsized share of employees reach the age where they are either retiring or dying , there's a massive loss in capability because corporate didn't staff or otherwise plan for the transfer of knowledge. There is a massive gulf between what GA wants to be and what it is. And only utter detachment on the part of the CEO could make this possible. I recall one Christmas luncheon to our group where Mr Blue was talking up GA railguns. "Missile interception capabilities at the lowest cost per unit fired." Our group doesn't have anything to do with the railguns. Did he know that? Then it hit me - GA's actual raison-d'etre, "Government money sink at the lowest amount of attention per unit profit".