Great for some but not for all - Software Engineer CA Engineering Employee Review

Many opportunities to try different things

Not a lot of hierarchy, hard to know who you are reporting to at times

The people who work at CA Engineering are wonderful! Very kind, understanding, and truly they try to help. The technologies used are excellent! Everyone I worked with was excellent! Quickly, you become family as you labor together to help the customer be happy (no easy feat!) The Tae Kwon Do guy that walks around seems really rough (it's his military background), but really he's one of the kindest people (Safety Tip: share hot chocolate chip cookies with him).

There seemed to be a disconnect between discussions held between senior leadership and managers in charge of various teams. It seemed managers of various teams would be informed about customer complaints, needs, costs, concerns, goals etc., but some managers would not relay (proactively) the information downward towards the employees in the trenches. This left the employees in the trenches, who were working on projects for a customer, uninformed. Thank goodness Agile methodology was being used! Standup meetings was where customer information typically got shared with us in the trenches. Another issue was sometimes managers would not have a project for you to work on that would be permitted to be charged towards the customer. In those cases, your time would have to be charged against CA Engineering (which is expensive for a small business - you should ALWAYS charge your time to the customer if possible!) This caused engineers, working in the trenches, to try to come up with their own projects that might benefit the customer. An uncomfortable position if you don't have an over-all business picture with direct knowledge about customer concerns, complaints, needs, wants, etc.