CAE Reviews

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

Great presence in Tampa's market.

Cons

Difficult to work with some managers.

Advice to Senior Management

Hire better managers

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

Friendly work environment
Good benefits - 401K w/ matching, health, dental, vision, life insurance, temp disability, etc...
Hours are flexible
Dress code is relaxed - jeans, polo, and sneakers

Cons

Pay-scale is lower than average
Management is unable to balance project workflow - lead to recent layoffs
Product is old and needs revamping - functionality is good but could be made to be better if they would walk away from VB6.

Advice to Senior Management

Manage the budget better

Pros

FULL AUTHORITY AND ACCOUNTABILITY FOR WORK. PEACEFUL AND CHALLENGING WORK ENVIRONMENT.

Cons

GONDIA IS HOT DRING SUMMER.

Advice to Senior Management

KEEP UP PROGRESSING AND BECOME WORLDS' BEST.

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.