MDA reviews

Pay is below market for my current qualifications and experience. Benefits are quite decent. Plenty of bureaucracy makes prototyping (manufacturing and procurement) activities a nightmare. Management is switching gears to defence which I have serious ethical concerns about, because the CEO is from a defence background, that's all he knows. The technology the company works on can easily be ported to civilian applications that have more stable long term prospects, but because the CEO knows defence, MDA does defence. Management claims to listen (Just Ask) but doesn't actually listen and take employees requests seriously, even about important matters. As a result, there aren't enough parking spots in the new building, even though the company had been warned for months leading up to the move that this was a concern. Depending on how hard you push, the advancement opportunities for younger employees are mixed. Some get trainings and put on projects they want, others eventually leave for this reason. Recently the company is pushing for 4-day RTO, which has angered quite a few employees. Lots of us can do work from home with no trouble. If they have to work on hardware, they accommodate accordingly. Mandating this is a bad decision.

Despite the fact that it operates in the forward looking space industry, MDA Space clings to the past in everything it does. Many of the staff members have operated for so long in "cost-plus" environments that they simply do not know what it means to work on fixed cost contracts, let alone in a product development environment where they actually have to compete in an open market (and cannot rely on pork barrel government contracts written to sway voters by promising local jobs). When presented with facts that challenge their distorted view of the world outside of MDA, they turn on the messenger rather than listen to the message. Management repeatedly claims to be introducing new, more effective ways of working, but all that they can come up with is a new seating arrangement. The actual engineering tools used by the company are 5 to 15 years out of date. The senior leadership has been holding regular town hall meetings about a change from a program focus to product focus, but they just keep showing the same slide over and over, adding no new information. The leadership expresses a need to accelerate the program schedule, but tell the team to continue operating the same way as before. Corporate leaderships asks the team to find ways to work more effectively, but then undermine any initiative that wouldn't let them personally take credit in front the board of directors, leading to a very strong "kiss up, kick down" culture that pervades the entire business.