- The company frequently misrepresents its history, acting as if they are a relatively new company that has always had a small team. Rocket Crafters Inc. (DBA Vaya Space) was founded in 2010, and has previously had many more employees than I was led to believe when I started. Inquiries about the company's past and why so many employees have left are met with evasion or in some cases personal attacks on former employees. News articles from the mid 2010s document numerous promises to create thousands of jobs and generate millions of dollars of investment, as well as the company receiving substantial government incentives, only for those promises to never materialize.
-The company is an echo chamber and very susceptible to groupthink. Ideas are often accepted by the group without being thoroughly evaluated (or evaluated at all) from a technical perspective, and then cannot be challenged without an emotional overreaction and petty retaliation.
- The company culture is heavily influenced by the existence of an exclusive social clique comprised of a handful of employees, and conversations at work frequently romanticize unhealthy behaviors associated with alcohol abuse.
- Everyone spends a tremendous amount of time in unproductive meetings. Greater than 25% of working hours per week are spent listening to updates that do not even remotely pertain to your role, or giving updates that aren't relevant to everyone else's. Every granular detail about every task you perform is expected to be reported to nearly the entire company several times per week.
- Work ethic is rewarded by being overloaded with tasks others don't want to do, even if those tasks fall within their job responsibilities but not yours. The less productive you are, the less work you are assigned, and many employees take advantage of that.
- Salary is very low for the industry, even taking Florida's low cost of living into account. Most employees were paid roughly 25% less than equivalent roles at other companies in the area. Pay was also inconsistent among employees with similar experience/seniority, and did not reflect whether employees held advanced degrees or had just graduated.
- The company's website and social media presence project a sense of arrogance that is not commensurate with the company's progress (or lack thereof) over the past 11 years. This lack of self-awareness, the out-of-touch approach to social media, and nonsensical marketing campaigns made me embarrassed to tell people where I worked. The website's extensive use of stock photos could also potentially mislead prospective employees about the size and diversity of the team, as well as the quality of the office environment. Additionally, both internal documents and reports submitted to external entities are consistently riddled with basic spelling and grammatical errors that I believe harm the company's image and professional relationships.
- Any and all results are represented as a success, no matter what. Of course any company performing research and development will experience failures and setbacks, which may given a positive spin for PR or simply not discussed publicly. However, acknowledging mistakes internally is essential to making progress, and Vaya's attitude of militant positivity hampers failure analyses and incident reviews by simply denying or ignoring the existence of problems.
- As is likely already clear to anyone reading these reviews, management has responded to honest ratings and accounts from former employees by posting several positive reviews in collaboration with or on behalf of the remaining employees, in an attempt to discredit them and inflate the average review score.
