MDA reviews

3.5

72% would recommend to a friend

(646 total reviews)
avatar

Mike Greenley

50% approve of CEO

63% positive business outlook

MDA has an employee rating of 3.5 out of 5 stars, based on 646 company reviews on Glassdoor which indicates that most employees have a good working experience there. The MDA employee rating is in line with the average (within 1 standard deviation) for employers within the Aeroespacial y defensa industry (3.6 stars).

Reviews by job title

646 reviews
2.0
Mar 1, 2019
Recommend
CEO approval
Business Outlook

Pros

There are some great people working as team leads that are the redeeming factor of the company. If you're lucky enough to get a good team lead, your time here could be okay. Work life balance tends to be really good. Working late seems to be a rare occurrence on most teams

Cons

Very little - No technical training. Starting here as a new hire or starting a new project can be extremely overwhelming. You're basically given a task and thrown into a stack/codebase with very little context or explanation. This combined with low employee retention means that there are often projects where even the senior engineers don't know how anything works. Often the "expert" on the system was given just a little training as you got, and you're all just reverse engineering some monolithic codebase. Constantly changing specs and priorities. Expect to be given work before the design phase is complete, thus repeating it again later. Expect to have high priority tasks come out of nowhere on a weekly basis and throw off your whole timeline. Low pay. This generally sucks if you're an employee. But also has the side effect of causing alot of people to leave, so many old systems have none of the original people left who worked on them (a big cause of confusion). Management has been "looking into salary adjustments" for the last 2 years, but those adjustments are always 6 months away, ad infinitum. One can only hope they'll conclude their salary market research sometime in the next decade.

4.0
Feb 13, 2019
Recommend
CEO approval
Business Outlook

Pros

First, I wanted to point out that I'm writing this somewhat in response to another review I saw on here about the halifax office. I felt it was pretty unfair. That review really took the mickey out of this place and it seemed a lot more enflamed than it should have been. Yes there are problems here, but what place doesn't have those? The style of work can be pretty intense and in every organization that tackles big projects there will be periods of frustration and there can be friction. Having said that, and speakign quite honestly, I have not seen bullying or harrassement, and I feel I've been pretty involved with some of the more intense conversations that happened late last year. I came in when there was a lot to tackle all at once and people had to work fast to address everything. In terms of the pros I currently see here... Pay is good for Halifax, and the benefits are better than almost all of the other high-tech companies around here. The flex-time feature is excellent as well. The culture here is a mix of casual and serious, but friendly nonetheless. So far the dev teams are supportive of eachother, and everybody is very smart. I get the same feeling about the other teams here as well even though I don't work with them. There's a lot of growth in terms of business and employees, plus the management clearly understands that there's risk in growing both at the same time so they're looking very carefully at the near and long term planning for the office. There's a ton of room to grow here for mid-range and even senior technical people, and there's an open approach to embracing new technology as best as possible in the team I'm currently in. I get the feeling that that's pretty common where possible. Free parking at the office is also very nice.

Cons

The cons of the Halifax office, hmm. The current office is old, and feels like a maze. It takes awhile to get used to. It also feels fairly dry in terms of recreational features compared to other offices in the city. In terms of work, there is a lack of solid process in some areas, especially around some of the projects though there's a very strong awareness of that and people are actively addressing it. Orientation/onboarding is extremely rapid and people need to be self-sufficient, but "old-hands" are supportive of helping people get moving and answering questions. Lastly, the current location in burnside is in a very tricky spot for traffic.

4.0
Feb 7, 2019

Good place to work

Recommend
CEO approval
Business Outlook

Pros

Stable environment Good colleagues Cafeteria on the building

Cons

Salary less than the average Old engineer methods

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