Very unethical practices - Facilities Coordinator Viasat Employee Review

1.0
3 Feb 2024
Recommend
CEO approval
Business outlook

Pros

Here's my perspective. Let me start by saying I was one of the 800 in the layoff. Mark D was originally touting about being a disruptor in the industry. We were told books to read about being a disruptor, then Elon disrupted the whole industry. After that the comments about being a disruptor ceased and all we heard was Mark D complaining about space junk and the number of sats that Elon was launching. Probably a necessary conversation but not a good one from a publicity point of view. Then we merged with Inmarsat. We launched a new satellite at the first of 2023 and the antenna didn't deploy. We were late getting it into orbit and that contributed to Viasat deciding to use the high thrust route to get it into its orbital position sooner. That decision is probably what led to the failure. After that Inmarsat launched a satellite that failed, so now Viasat has two pieces of space junk in orbit. Is this poetic justice? Viasat's system is based on a distribution of smaller gateways. By having a multitude of these, they can achieve tremendous reliability except for the single point of failure, which is the satellite itself. At this point they have a large cash investment in the distributed gateways across the USA with no satellite. For the layoff, I was surprised at the number of technical leaders that were included in this. I can understand a reduction in force as finances dictate this. What I don't understand is laying off many of the subject matter experts. This speaks poorly of the long term goals of the company. This says they are mainly concerned with short term cashflow. Maybe this is survival mode but it does make them to work for,

Cons

Unethical and corrupt P&C. High amounts of nepotism.

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Viasat Response
2y
Thank you for the review. Over the past several months, our leadership team has worked to mitigate the impact of various shifts in our business. There’s a limit to what can be shared broadly in situations like this, and we understand the unfortunate frustration that this can create. That said, we truly value your feedback and are committed to being as transparent as possible to help our employees understand the rationale behind difficult decisions and all the tradeoffs considered. We wish you the best of luck in your future career!

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