DEKA Research and Development Reviews

I'll preface this as different projects run different ways and this is only my experience, but management hires like minded individuals so there is a good chance you'll see similar issues on other projects Is DEKA a Start-up? DEKA is a company that started in the early 80's and primarily makes money through creating IP and getting paid royalties on each unit sold. The company is currently private and there is no intention of ever bringing the company public. This means there are no RSUs or stock opportunities to offset salary. The company promotes a start-up culture looking for self-starters and self-motivated engineers through their hiring process. This means you will be expected to wear many hats and experience self-imposed issues due to the flat hierarchical structure that is in place. Working at DEKA would be akin to working in the tech industry during the dot com era. DEKA wants to hire as few engineers as possible to crank out the best result. This results in the self-starters becoming "rock star" engineers. One of these engineers can easily get the work done better and faster than a team of engineers can, but when working in a team they can't communicate and have issues dividing and conquering. The "rock star" engineers have been seen as a negative at most companies for years, but at DEKA they are still highly valued. Dead Sea Effect DEKA is a text book case of the Dead Sea Effect. This occurs when the managerial practices of a team results in the competent members leaving for greener pastures while the less competent remain behind. The less competent remain due to lack of options and skills to move to a better company. Learning Opportunities When you interview at DEKA you hear interviewers talk about the large amounts of learning opportunities that are available. While this is technically available, be aware that the vast majority of this is self-learning and not through a mentoring process. Do not expect to get challenged on design and coding decisions. The emphasis is always get any working solution over well designed and maintainable solutions. This is reflected through code reviews which tend to be very hand-wavy where reviewers only look for obvious logic errors over trying to understand the code and giving well thought out feedback. Attrition There are always employees starting and leaving at DEKA. HR will make some announcement at the end of the year about how they hired 100 new people and how you should take that as a sign the company is growing quickly. What they leave out is that 90 employees had left the company so their gains are not that special. Many managers use employees leaving as a way to shrink budget by consolidating responsibilities to another engineer over hiring a replacement. This is of course without any extra pay or benefits. It is just expected that you take one of the teams. Engineering Culture The general philosophy is to hire junior engineers and indoctrinate them in to how the company wants to operate. You will find few mid-level engineers at this company, because they often leave for greener pastures. The engineers that get hired as entry and make it to Senior status will push the company line and be favored by management. You will find many Senior Engineers that have stagnated skills by working here for 10+ years. For many of them this has been their only job in the industry. Management is even worse with most of them being around since the 90's. So when you work at DEKA you should be prepared to assimilate into their way of doing things. They will say they are open to new ideas and ways of doing things, but generally speaking these improvements will be deprioritized in favor of delivering something. The bottom line always takes priority. There's a conflict between project managers (who care about budget) and engineers (who care about good engineering). Many times there is not enough staff on a project so engineers get stretched thin. Low Salary As many posts mentioned, salary is low at DEKA and you should expect to be paid 30% below market rate. The company does not see themselves as competing with Boston, MA companies even though it is 45 minutes away. This means engineers with the ability to work in Boston will rarely choose to work at DEKA which translates to a smaller pool of candidates. You will hear promises of bonuses when the project gets approved by the FDA and while these events occur it is never worth staying to cash in on one of these events. The formula is along the lines of 1 day of salary for every 6-months you are a full time employee at the company. Using the formula the numbers never make up for being paid 30% below market rate over multiple years as job hopping could easily give you a 50% pay raise instantly. There is a holiday bonus that is determined at the discretion of your project manager. Unfortunately the project manager is likely a person who you probably have never interacted with and knows nothing about you. As a high impact senior engineer who had been at the company for many years I never received more than $4k for a holiday bonus. DEKA is a private company and has no aspirations to go public. This means there are no stocks or RSUs to supplement salary. This means DEKA can never compete, total compensation wise, with top tech companies whose total compensation packages are detailed on various internet sites. Benefits Benefits at DEKA are very basic. There is no free food or ping pong tables. The health care plans are based around catastrophic events. PTO is limited to 10 days for your first 5 years and 15 days after that. There is no concept of "Unlimited PTO" that other companies have. Sick days are unlimited, but are scrutinized closely due to the fear of employees taking advantage of the system. There is a 401K plan where they match 50% up to 6% with a managed T.Rowe Price account or a self managed Charles Schwab account. There are guest speakers that periodically come to speak. These events are infrequent and usually somebody doing the CEO a favor. So do not expect a speaker series like you would see at Google. Company Process There is a lot of process at DEKA and much of it is paper based. Engineers are expected to participate in generating this paper work as part of their job as the majority of products have to be auditable by the FDA. So while paperwork should not be unexpected it is a shame that there is no motivation to have an internal effort to digitize the process as much as possible. There are some custom tools made in house, but the paperwork process was digitized more than a digital process was made to conform to guidance documents. There is a subtle difference between these two thoughts that was lost on management. Management also insisted that these internal tools did not need to conform to basic software processes like testing and code reviews. This is because it was an internal tool. Many of these tools are still being used today, but are not being updated as the engineers that were responsible have long left the company. Software Process The general process for software teams is not terrible, but they do leave you wanting more. Work is scheduled in a combination waterfall/agile kind of way taking the worst from both. Things like automated testing and code reviews are done superficially and miss many things that teams find later. Continuous test and continuous integration has been something that is talked about, but it never makes it to a priority task after years of discussion. I suspect that when it does become priority the project will be proclaimed done, rendering the change moot. While you would never release medical software in a continuous manner, the principles are still useful to ensure quality is built into the process and not treated as an after thought. Deadlines There is a lot of check the box work on projects due to deadlines and promises made by management to the customer. The majority of the time these estimates were made with the idea of everything going perfect, even when engineering protests. When issues arise instead of going back to the customer and looking for more time management pressures engineering to find a quick fix or to work overtime. This is because management knowingly made bad promises in the hope things go perfect and they do not want to lose respect by owning up to the issue. Unfortunately quick fixes turn into permanent fixes quickly due to this style of management. Engineers (Co-Workers) The vast majority of engineers are smart people that are looking to do their job and go home. I've met many Senior Software Engineers that have stagnated skills with no motivation to improve because the code down to management's requests opposed to telling management here is how to create a quality product. This is not everybody, but it is a large enough population that it is noticable and affects my quality of life as someone that wants to create a quality product. Many Software Engineers, including Seniors, just make things work. Yes there are code reviews, but the culture is to just look for logic issues. There is no examination of the actual design and how the change works in the bigger picture of code. This has led to awkward conversations where fixing bugs means major rewrites of a subsystem as there is no way to untangle the bad code on top of bad code and make everything work. Many times the issue is just kicked down the road because they do not want to have these tough conversations with the customer. There are static analysis tools, but hundreds of issues are just triaged away because it's deemed by the developer as "not worth their time" or "it's fine". While I am not opposed to triaging issues away, it should be done for objective technical reasons. This leads to a big issue of objectivity. There is none, engineers do not want to discuss pros and cons to come up with good designs and deal with time later. The first idea that sounds workable in the time given becomes the solution. This is because the engineer culture that has grown is one of getting things done fast and cheap. This is a result of how management plans projects and creates deadlines. New features are being added all the time and built upon buggy software. I have seen an issues database with 1000 "bugs", but yet it's more important to add new features over fixing these issues. Management optimizes for adding and fixing user facing tasks to advertise progress with the customer over ensuring the project sits on a solid base framework. Working Environment The majority of the work you get will be assigned to you. You should not expect to have a say in priority of tasks or the direction of the project unless you are a Team Lead or in management. In any given week priorities for a given engineer will often change. This is due to management always reacting to situations instead of being proactive. You should be comfortable to work in an everything is on fire environment where you have to quickly react to your managers daily concerns. To help with this, management loves to hire self-starters because it's possible to take advantage of their enthusiasm. Conclusion There is more I could talk about, but what I have said gets the point across pretty well. This is not a place you want to work at if you want to improve your skills and grow your career.