Pros
Lots of smart and friendly people, many employees are from prestigious east coast universities Employes are given all the tools to succeed in terms of hardware/software. If have a good reason why you want something and can prove how it will make the product better, save money or whatever you goal is then it will usually be bought. Start-up like atmosphere, small groups working on big and complex projects. Each project is treated as it's own start-up company from managements perspective. There is a team of people dedicated to that project and that is all they work on. DEKA is NOT a software company nor is it run like one. You don't work for the Software/EE/ME/etc division and get loaned out to projects. In line with my above point you work for a project. Thus there is minimal sharing of code between projects and unless you make the personal effort you don't really know what is happening on other projects. You should consider working at DEKA as working at a start-up company. To this point each project is sadly run differently. You get a bad lead you will have a bad time. This is reflected in reviews on this site and how there are people all over the map on their opinion of DEKA. The rest of this review I'm going to take an in general approach since each project can be so different. I cannot guarantee my experiences will be yours if you choose to work at DEKA. Work-life balance is what you make of it. While DEKA would love for you to work 60+ hours every week for no extra money it is not expected as the normal. Many people like what they are working on and stay late anyways. DEKA and management will challenge you to get things done faster and stay longer. You just have to stand up and say that their demands are unreasonable and what you think wold be reasonable, e.g. I can get "X" done in this time frame but to get "Y" done I have to do A,B,C which isn't possible for 1 person. Either the scope will get reduced or it's deemed important enough that you will get somebody to help you. No micro-management, you are expected to get stuff done and to ask questions as needed. You are expected to do some research before asking questions. Asking something that Google can tell you in 2 minutes will not shine a good light on you. In some reviews people feel they are not trained properly or want more guidance. This is DEKA in a nutshell as if you don't ask the right questions or get help you will be left to flounder. Nobody is going to hand hold you through anything even at the junior level so if you don't work well independently then DEKA is not for you. Company hierarchy is very flat and it is encouraged to just talk to the people you need to talk to directly. You don't need to go through your boss or anything like that. On the flip side there isn't much promotion opportunities if that is your thing and is in line with the DEKA is a bunch of little start-up company analogy. No set amount of sick days, so if you are sick do not come in and infect everybody else. If you contribute to Intellectual Property matters you will get the recognition, but nothing more comes out of it outside of your name on the patent as an inventor You can make a big impact if you like to take chances. Suggest better technology to use and better ways to solve issues are encouraged but you must have good reasons why, because it's the latest tech isn't a good reason. The best way is to show how it will save money for DEKA and the customer. If you can produce and get stuff done you will get a yearly raise. The amount varies based on your current salary and how you rate against other people at DEKA. You won't go from 50K to 85K overnight, but you will get a steady 7%-10% raises to get your salary to what they deem is an appropriate level. Self-managed 401K through Charles Schwab is nice for those who like to do their own stock trading.
Cons
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.