Big aerospace took over and ruined a promising startup - Recensione dipendente - Dipendente anonimo presso Wisk

The company culture shifted profoundly when Boeing first appeared. I was at the all-hands meeting in our cafe space when our CEO brought out the Boeing upper management and their hand picked CEO who had some dealings with the DoD. The mood in that room was very tense as this was around the time the 737 Max travesty was becoming known to the public and was certainly well known to this very aerospace focused audience. At that introduction the Boeing cohort told the at the time ZEE/KH/Cora team that nothing would change, they believed in the project, and this only meant better resources for the team. Compensation changed, they installed Boeing employees in key Wisk positions whose interest was to Boeing, and the resources in the form of IP or technology was if it came slow in delivery and incomplete because of the lack of willingness on the Boeing side to actually deliver on that promise. The CEO Boeing installed was unable to make decisions about company direction, project direction, and never seemed to be in charge like our former leadership. The VP of engineering, a Boeing employee, was never around and was equally as paralyzed when it came to decision making. After that round of Boeing leadership was cut loose the next round was even worse. The VP of engineering was someone that had run a different startup’s engineering team into the ground (just Google for the person and find the company reviews from his time there). This person had only one thing at the top of his agenda, personal gain. In direct 1:1 meetings he would actively multitask, miss out on entire segments of the conversation, not be aware of the action item reporting on items he assigned and seemingly forgotten about, and felt that the key to success was constant reorganization and org chart shakeups. This person had an agenda of cronyism and brought in a new ring of middle managers to prop himself up higher in the org charts he was re-writing and insulate himself from the people who had built the technology that was now owned by Boeing. The new middle management were many people who had close ties to this person or others with little actual technical ability. During this time period there was an extremely disturbing closeness of the manufacturing organization and quality department where the quality leadership directly reported to the manufacturing leadership. This part is very important…The people signing off on the quality of the parts reported directly to the person whose job was to hit manufacturing milestone dates.