MDA Software Developer reviews

Good place to go if you are looking for a place to fall death or you just don’t care about your career and want a measly salary. Old company, run by old rules, similar to a factory. Very hierarchical decision making. People with no technical background giving technical directives, without being held accountable for they decisions. All the bad reviews below are completely true, don’t doubt any of the things they mention. Nepotism all over the place. They don’t care about their employees, not even the most senior ones that have given 10 to 20 years of their life to the company, after all those years they are rewarded with a couple hundred dollars as a “present” from the company. Terrible decision making by leaders, they can’t understand why their products are subpar, they think that their process is going to protect them forever, so they can’t see that all the “company” is already obsolete. They overlook some of the most important parts of modern software development and don’t even know which standards to follow. Also, the cafeteria food is awful, and there is no alternative, since the place is located far away from civilization. The Canadian government should just shut them down, they are just wasting our taxes on their eternal vacation and being a bad example for young engineers. If you want to continue your career after working there try to forget everything you learned there, or just think about it as “I will work hard to never become like the people at MDA”.

Salary - You will see ~100% of the reviews here mention salary as a con. It's not an exaggeration; this is very much reality. Salaries at MDA are stuck in the 1990s, which is a huge reason top talent would never hesitate to reject an MDA offer despite given the opportunity to work on something unique. It's gotten to the point where most start-ups with limited or no-funding can offer more competitive packages. No performance bonus - This may seem a bit crazy, but there are no performance bonuses. I suspect this exacerbates the issues mentioned below. There is little incentive to perform at your best. Project management - Absolutely abysmal. Due to the low retention rate of new hires (< 3 years), there are a significant amount of "senior"s in this company. People who have been here 5~10 years+ are everywhere. Some of these people abuse their seniority to shut down innovation and any idea that may differ from theirs, citing "experience" or "this is the way MDA has done it for 20+ years" and rejecting any and all evidence in the outside community stating otherwise. Whether this abuse of seniority comes explicitly or implicitly does not matter; it is heavily prevalent within the company. As the baby boomers with 20~30+ years at this company who had the mentality of loyalty to a company retire, you're stuck with a bunch of relatively young people who have been so used to the coasting and refused to sharpen their skills that they're no longer capable of getting other more competitive offers. Don't get me wrong, not everyone is like this; there are smart people who are not adverse to learning and growth, but chances are you will be dragged down and suffocated by processes and ignorance. This is a place where seniority has the last say and everyone wants to stir the pot with their opinion even if they have zero knowledge in a specific domain just so they can assert their dominance and attempt to get promoted via visibility. Understandably, this results in a lot of back and forth, stalemates, etc until someone senior enough gets tired and prompts a decision. Even when a decision is made, there will be many times where weeks or months down the road, the same people will question the decisions and force a "refactor" or "rearchitecture" ad nauseam. Very little focus on the actual advancement/quality of the project, and more about ego. There is a reason new hire retention and churn is so high, and aside from the stone age compensation packages, it's definitely not due to a bias for action.