CAE Reviews in Montreal, QC Area

Pros

Good place to start a career, lots of opportunities to learn technologies and business. Pretty good work/life balance. Good salary.

Cons

Long hours are expected, but overtime is not always recognized. Upper management needs to communicate more with all lower employees

Advice to Senior Management

Reward excellence, communicate and motivate employees more, continue the work/life balance support, encourage employees to try more innovative technologies as it pays in the end

Pros

The company operates in an exciting domain, and produces interesting products

Cons

Very bureaucratic, though necessarily so.

Advice to Senior Management

Some community building activities would be nice

Pros

Big company with different jobs you can try

Cons

No real growth opportunities. Always firefighting never planning ahead.

Advice to Senior Management

Think about how to keep your employees and encourage them to work harder

Pros

You participate in the making of outstanding products. You have the chance to work on the best flight simulators in the industry.

Cons

It is a very big company. You can feel sometimes like you're a simple number to the company. But I guess this is similar to any big company.

Advice to Senior Management

Keep going this way. You have the leadership to lead this company further.

Pros

You will have the opportunity to work in big project for major compagnies (Boeing, Bombardier, Airbus). You also would have the opportunity to move between CAE sites around the world

Cons

CAE is big, perhaps too big (in Montreal). You have a lot of protocol to follow and it result in a lack of human interactions

Advice to Senior Management

Organize at least one journey for the intern to see the real products of CAE (the simulators), it's very frustrating to work on simulators and not see them.

Pros

Opportunity to travel the world. Friendly atmosphere.

Cons

Sweat shop. Midnight bug-fixing shifts Huge amount of favoratism shown by management towards people of the same culture as themselves (eg. Lebanese, Vietnamese etc). Salaries have not risen since the late 1990s. When I left CAE in 1998, my salary as a TS-III was 64K. Today in 2011 CAE salaries have not risen much. House prices in Montreal have doubled since that time. I am surprised that the median salary is, what, 66K for a software engineer/developer.

Advice to Senior Management

Less favoratism, more professionalism and recognition of ability.

Pros

Great place to learn about design, and manufacturing. Another great reason to work for CAE Inc. would be the visibility to the business side of the simulator business.

Cons

Management seems to be constantly hesitating to hire more employees even though the company is very busy, the attitude of over working the employees they have rather than hiring more can be exhausting.

Pros

Host updates was great. Got to travel all over the world and it was interesting work. Job consisted in porting the code from very old machines to new Linux boxes, so quite challenging. I got to learn "history" through working with those old machines, but was constantly up to date working with current Linux boxes. Flying the simulators on site was a real bonus.

Cons

Layoffs handled poorly. Salaries aren't amazing.

Advice to Senior Management

Deal better with layoffs.

Pros

Overtime is paid.
Travel for business is possible, if you like to travel.

Cons

Management is incompetent.
Constant restructuring, management is changed yearly to avoid giving employees rewards for past achievements.
Constant layoffs.
Too much travel, no life work balance.
Technology is old and experience very specialized .
Almost no training.
Too big gap between management and employees. While employees salaries are frozen or cut, management receives fat bonuses. (sometimes bonus equals 16 times their salary)

Advice to Senior Management

Employees engagement is very important to the success of a business. There is not enough recognition in the company for regular "Joe". All the recognition goes to middle and upper management.

Pros

The technical domain is fascinating.
People at engineering and technical levels are great
It's a nice multicultural place.

Cons

Periodic lay off since few years (say 2003) despite large federal aids.
Some of the middle management composed by "green MBAs" is building there own ivory tower.
Too much politics on top of technical work produces unecessary pressures, sometime it's close to harassment, on employees and makes working methodology not enough efficient.
In some department, people are not well-respected by medium and top managment.

Advice to Senior Management

Are those pressures necessary to the employees?