CA Technologies Reviews

Pros

9-5 workplace. Has a nice gym. If you are in the right department you can just ride along and enjoy the ride.

Cons

To many to mention - one of the worst places I have ever worked. Pathetic leadership, no accountability. Shoot the messenger mentality. Say nothing and maybe survive - speak out and you are gone.

Advice to Senior Management

Most people view the C - level and SVP leveal at CA as 'Tone Deaf'. The concept of 'shoot the messenger' is alive and well and that's why your business operations are so bad.

Pros

WW locations, compensation up to standards as seen from others, cash reserves of company, a lot of different job opportunities

Cons

lack of internal communications, constantly changing directions and goals both internally and externally, lack of defined career paths, lack of salary bands, performance reviews are treated as a check box, limited ability to move around to different job areas, executive mangement top heavy

Advice to Senior Management

internal communications by department needs to be reviewed and considered a good practice, implementation of career paths needs to be defined and launched along with understanding of salary ranges, managers should have management training.

Pros

Benefits
 training - CA Learning. Great tool to expose individuals to product.

Cons

*****Very interesting that US employees comment no job security as a Con and the folks form India comment job security as a Pro.*******
Constant layoffs
Frequent re-orgs
consistantly changing focus
difficult to achieve work/life balance without cost to career advancement
There is a feeling that CA buys new companies only to move work to India (or China).

Pros

Good technology and integration is on the right way.

Cons

CA has a bunch of BU's competing whith eachother...
The worst work experience ever.

Advice to Senior Management

Listeon to the ground troops, listen to the customers.

Pros

If you are good, you will get opportunities to work on tough tasks.
Works great if you are a sweet talker. That alone makes management very happy.
If you are in Sales or Marketing, this is a great place to be. Not so much on the engineering side, see last point in cons.

Cons

Corresponding to the first pro point, you will not get growth and recognition for it.
Frustrating if you don't know how to be servile toward the management even if you are the best technical person they may have.
No flexibility in terms of time on the engineering side.
Poor retention of great talent.
Sub-par hiring.
Poor technology choices.
No experience building their own product, ever! They only acquire and sell.

Advice to Senior Management

Learn to retain talent and attract better talent than what you have.
Employ leadership that knows how to build something from scratch.

Pros

experience to add to your resume

Cons

work life balance completely out of whack

Advice to Senior Management

Quit pushing this initiative or that from sr. mgmt. and goaled-and-bonused directorships. Pay more attention to the actual needs of the customers AND the individual contributors who actually do care about the customers (more than you care about $aving dollar$ by sending jobs overseas). We end up working like dogs because we care about our deliverables and the customers who use them. If you would pay more attention to individual contributors and customers (and less attn to directorships with hollow initiatives and arbitrary deadlines) we would ALL benefit because the stock would rise by our sheer energy -- we have a lot (and potential pride at working somewhere where we matter). Our customers would be happier and buy more. It would be win-win. Can you imagine THAT?

Pros

The benefits are decent even if the copays are high. They have a flexible workplace and most departments are ok with work/life balance. The salaries and bonuses tend to be good. They will often give out discretionary 401k and stock.

Cons

Strange culture which the CEO himself calls "passive-compliance." There are hundreds of people who have been there so long that they are jaded and don't care anymore. They say yes but don't really help you. This means you come on board very excited but eventually you realize that either a. no one will help you b. no one actually cares and the end result are whole teams of very jaded individuals.

Rather than weed out the chaff in their layoffs (which occur EVERY six months, marketing in particular is always hardest hit) they cut middle management who actually do the work, instead of the old-timers who are dead weight. That way they won't have 28 years of severance to pay out to hit their quarter's bottom line.

Advice to Senior Management

There is a lot of talk right now about shifting the culture. It's all talk. You can't just TALK about shifting culture. You can't expect jaded employees to make the shift on their own. Find ways to motivate and energize your teams. I didn't know a soul there who was excited about coming into work the next day...that's a bad sign.

Don't say you care about your employees and do line-item budget cutting lay-offs...explore WHO is working and WHO isn't. In many cases it's the department head who is the worst offender.

Pros

Could find any level of tasks.

Cons

Too many layoffs, to much information hidden from employees.

Advice to Senior Management

You cannot cut meat forever.

Pros

Really good benefits. It is reasonably easy to get information and navigate the company.

Cons

It feels very corporate. It is very impersonal at a indevidual contributor level and often rewards are only really given notice to you directly.

Advice to Senior Management

Take a little more investment in your employees and keep up with the market. Everything seems to be a suprise in the market place and you seem to be struggling to keep the entire business aligned with the goals you have set forth. You need to work on making remote offices not feel like they are out on an island.

Pros

flexible working time and hours, nice office settings, extra time off before long holidays, good development and training opportunities, good benefits.

Cons

to much reliance on outsourcing to the India development center, little chance of moving to different positions and work on different tasks.

Advice to Senior Management

value contribution of existing employees and investment in existing products. Do not use reduction of workforce as the only means to push up stock price.