The biggest complaint about DEKA is pay. The pay is low just how the CEO likes it. You can definitely get better pay at other companies, but you may not work on projects as interesting as what is found at DEKA.
CEO and management mind set is that you should be honored to work here and if you don't like it than leave. Management in general doesn't care if you are unhappy. don't like you salary, don't like what you are working on. Pretty much it's deal with it or leave. Some leads do try to help employees move to other projects if that's what they want, but I wouldn't consider this normal. Those are just exceptional leads that care about their workers.
training is minimal to non-existient. Now I know what you are thinking, above in the pros you said ask questions and you are left to your own asks with no micro-management, yay!! I still think that's great, but junior engineers/developers need to be taught a good foundation. People need to take the time to show them good ways to do things and really walk them through the process oppose to letting them solve something only to be going in the wrong direction and need to be redone. If they are writing test code, look at it not just for the test cases, but how the code is written as well. I get that everybody has stuff to do, but junior people need to be paid attention to a lot more so they can grow into proper mid/senior engineers.
Not enough feedback on job performance. There is a yearly review, but sometimes things come up that should be talked about sooner. This doesn't happen unless its a fire that needs to be fixed right now. Too many times people do subpar work and aren't told that their work is subpar. Somebody else just comes along and fixes it.
no west coast style perks like free food, drinks or other things that would trick somebody to stay at work longer. No pool tables. game rooms, couches or anything like that.
employee cafe is available. This is outsourced to local places to set up shop in the building. The CEO price fixes them to a certain range $4-$6 lunches which causes them to cut corners and food quality is never high. Sadly this isn't a place where you'll eat unless it's raining or where walking to someplace better is prohibitive. Surprisingly there is food cart that sets up shop across the street in the spring/summer/fall that has 1000% better food for around $7
employees leaving for greener pastures all the time, but the hiring rate is a bit faster. So at the end of the year there be more employees than the previous. You'll hear numbers like 90 new hires in the past year, but comparing total numbers to the previous year there are only 30 more people. Minimal mid-teir workers at DEKA, it's mostly junior level people and Senior level people along with the lifers.
poor planning by management on some projects which leads to other teams needing to come help finish stuff as there is too much work and too little time. Sadly management either doesn't see the future need or has some mandate to keep budget low. Either way stuff hits the fan and people need to "come to the rescue." What usually happens is the product now works in more than prototype form, but now we need to crank through the development process e.g. design reviews, testing, documentation, etc.... Better foresight and planning is needed, but never seems to happen and thus they don't learn from past mistakes. This could be due to issues that I am not privy to and my complaint is incorrectly founded, but at this time this is how I see it.
Too many people put in charge of subsystems only because they get stuff done and with no thought to the quality of the work. Just because the code works does not mean it was designed well. This is seen a lot in software where people are put in charge of code when I think they aren't ready. They get stuff done and working, but the code is not readable, maintainable or anything like that. In the long run the technical debt may catch up to people when you have to make a big change.
People say the DEKA name is good on your resume, but I don't see it in all cases. DEKA is a company that either somebody know who DEKA is and want to bring you in for an interview on that name or they have no idea why they should care about DEKA. In most cases it's the latter.
