Pros
Ball Aerospace is a solid company with decent pay and benefits for the aerospace/defense industry. They promote education with a good tuition reimbursement package. For most exempt employees, there are no stock awards or annual cash bonuses. In lieu of this, BA targets your retirement by providing a pension (after 5 years and full pension benefits ONLY with retirement at age 65), options to participate in a 401K and an ESPP plan, and finally company bonus monies into your 401K if BA meets its targets. BA also has most of its operations centered in Colorado for both management, development, and even manufacturing.
Cons
The things that Ball Aerospace is not able to advertise is as follows. They are essentially transforming into a Westminster-based defense contractor. If you have dreams of working on cool space projects in Boulder, those are few and decreasing, despite that is most of what they advertise. BA’s growth area is defense, not space. 75-80% of their business is defense; 15-20% is in public space projects. The rest is “other”, such as training and support. Understand going into BA that the odds are that you will be working defense projects on their South campus (Broomfield and Westminster). BA is looking to move up the food chain from a component supplier to a prime that will be developing the entire system, like a Lockheed or a Northrop, and they are recklessly bidding for projects beyond their means to staff them. These changes lead to two different worlds within BA, and you can see this dichotomy in the reviews at Glassdoor. The minority of people at the Boulder locations on space projects are working on 5-7 year long programs with copious planning and management. Those folks give great reviews of BA. The majority of people are on defense programs with short 12-18 month schedules and very little planning, getting beaten up for cost and schedule, and ALOT of winging it. Most senior technical personnel are spread across 6 or more programs, and cannot adequately support the programs to which they are assigned. Folks are burning out over working in that environment, and it leads to the negative reviews. There is opportunity here in the churn if that is the kind of environment that you are looking for, but expect to be tossed about in the waves. Lastly, BA makes a big deal about people who have worked at BA for 25+ years, but that heralded culture is long gone. You are left with a split company with a wave of people retiring on the job and those relatively new folks scrambling in perpetuity to do what they think is right. There is definitely a male, old-boys-club atmosphere that you have to decide if you want to work with as well.