Top talent departs Jeff Bezos’ Blue Origin as NASA lander fight escalates
cnbc.com
cnbc.com
Does anyone have any insight as to the reasons for the departures, apart from 'frustration with management' and 'bureaucratic structure'?
If I had to distill the myriad reasons for the waves of departures down to one theme: disappointment. Folks who have been at Blue Origin since before Smith witnessed a huge shift in mentality, going from “we hired you all because you’re smart and we need smart people” under previous leadership to “we’re gonna do what Bob says because he’s the boss”. It’s absolutely demoralizing, even more so because Bob Smith clearly has no idea how to actually make Blue Origin competitive with the likes of SpaceX, as evidenced by everything you’ve already read in the media recently.
No doubt about it.
When engineers like this get a new or changing CEO or anyone in a leadership position having strong impact, the person can become widely disappointing if the leadership positiion is not occupied by someone actually up to the same level of excellence.
Different consensus can be built that these are some low-performance operators or executives.
No doubt about it.
Except the engineers who depend on the situation for their income regardless don't talk about it.
The rest leave.
When you get somebody in a leadership position without the specific leadership ability necessary, they might as well not have any proven leadership ability at all.
It's way worse if the position is occupied with someone having the opposite type of ability.
It can be death to technology before they ever had computer technology.
There will be a force at work which brings the remaining engineers' achievable level of technology down to that of the lower capability of excellence imposed from above.
Even Elon Musk seems to generate a degree of disappointment, so there is always going to be some room for improvement. Maybe he sets a higher bar by being more widely recognized as a high-performance operator himself. You would have to do the math.