Cubic Transportation Systems Reviews

Pros

The people
The culture-very inclusive, open door policy
Management open to work-life balance
9/80 work schedule
Very approachable senior management team

Cons

The facilities, although changes are being made.
Vacation policy-10 days per year for the first 5 years, thereafter it gets better. Should roll vacation and sick into one and have a PTO policy.

Advice to Senior Management

Realizing your hands are somewhat tied when it comes to changes, keep trying. Continue to improve the facilities and to try and improve the vacation schedule. Involve employees in decisions-ask for feedback, ideas etc.

Pros

There is a lot of business in the pipeline.
Pay is competitive
Benefits are OK, no eyeglass coverage
Employees work hard and do good.
Most people have been there for years 10+

Cons

24/7/365 work culture
Management does not forecast revenue and expenses well. When they miss they lay off staff to meet budget.
On Call Duty=Tired Admin. 200-500 pages a week
Culture does not support comp time for excessive work hours. I can work 80 hour a week for 3 weeks and then I have to take a vacation day to recover.
Policies are not consistently applied to people
Very political environment recognition, promotions salary given to successful politicians
Even though Mgmt says they are an operations company they cannot shake the project company paradigm
2 weeks vacation to start. You get 1 day more for each year after 5 yrs(10 years 3 weeks) and at 1 day more per 2 years (10-20yrs) max out at 4 weeks after 20.
Senior management doesn't know what they want - 2 management employees hired in the last year who were each fired after less than 12 working days

Advice to Senior Management

Provide staff with downtime/Offer more vacation
apply company/hr polices equally
Allow staff to have more of a work life balance
Financial models have to change, they are not working.
Invest in the infrastructure, your 2005 equipment breaks more than a new one. Getting a new one will reduce the stress on your staff though increased uptime and improve staff productivity.

Pros

Cubic has operations all over the world, so there may be interesting opportunities in other countries. HQ is in San Diego, and visits to HQ are strongly encouraged.

Cons

It is a very political environment, and long-term employess who have strong relationships (personal relationships) with top execs tend to fare better.

Advice to Senior Management

Management needs to do more than talk about transforming the way the compny does business. The compny's well-earned reputatiuon won't change unless the company itself changes.

Pros

Electronic systems, that you can find faults makes the day interesting
If you like to be out there on a field
Very good rota system

Cons

Exposed to someone that knows less than you, and he is your team leader because is a favorite, or belongs to the same (family group) with others
Prepare to be ask for something on the phone and get something else.....
Prepare to go somewhere to do a task, only to discover that you provided with wrong address, with wrong contact no, and discover when you find the place eventually that they still waiting for installation first place and the arrangement is different
Prepare to have someone for your leader that never bothers to see you and embarrassing you over the phone without a reason, and try to downgrade you......

Advice to Senior Management

Listen to the field Engineers, they do the work so the back office staff can get paid.....
They are the first contact to your customers
Make a plan to collect information from them

Pros

If you learned all if your IT skills in the 90s, this is the place for you!

Casual environment - jeans and tshirts
Nice managers
Nice building
Nice employees
No competition or backstabbing between departments or management
You have to do something REALLY bad to get fired

Cons

Ancient operating systems
Ancient servers
Ancient network
Ancient storage
Ancient ideas on how infrastructure should function
Pager duty is simply horrible - average 300-400 pages per week at all hours
Coffee is terrible

Advice to Senior Management

Management should look into the definition of proactive. Physical and electronic security is a joke. The hardware of most systems is beyond end-of-life. The custom software is horrible and barely works. Management should be thinking of the future and should be proactively upgrading systems and software BEFORE they die.

Pros

CTS is a small division, so you can learn about a tremendous domain. Some of the things I've touched in the past 12 months have been contactless credit cards, PCI compliance, prepaid debit cards, inventory systems, data warehousing and virtual hosting. It's thinly staffed, so if you're motivated, you can easily get assigned to do new things.

Cons

This is a small division of a large company. Some corporate edicts make sense, many do not. Employees are driven by timecards, down to 15 minute increments. When there is lots of work, these are easy to deal with-- you have a primary project, and that's what you charge to. When work is slimmer (like now) it's tougher. Lots of managers want accurate estimates... but give you no charge number. CTS does very little R&D-- everything is paid for by customers. So what you work on is limited by the customers vision, which can be shortsighted.

Advice to Senior Management

Decide on R&D projects to work on during downturns. You're going to have to pay for your salaried employees anyway, might as well have them doing things that will make or save you money 6 months down the road. Come up with a licensing model for equipment and backend software. It shouldn't be free. Decide that support and maintenance is a priority and staff and allocate resources appropriately. Our customers know the quality of our support, and that's why they won't pay for it.

Pros

Everyone agrees cities need more public transit. CTS does exactly that, by providing the means to funding public transit. That means the current systems are maintained, and justifies expanding older systems.

Cubic is a great company for the neophyte or the old fox. The neophyte will get lots of learning opportunities about technical matters, office politics, and the dirtier side of engineering. The old fox gets good benefits, and only needs COLA raises.

There are quite a few superb people, especially on the technical side. On the management side, you've gotta appreciate them for their Machiavellian nature and flexible moral fiber.

Cons

For the technical person who's been there awhile, you'll get small raises, and work on LOTS of legacy systems. CTS has been putting in systems for over 30 years, and if you've been there awhile, you'll get to work on some of these that were cutting edge-- 10 to 20 years ago.

Most new proposals are done as "This is the same as [insert previous project]!" and budgeted accordingly. No time is given to doing in depth estimates beforehand. Customers demand all-inclusive fixed-price bids, so when the work actually comes in the door, you're almost guaranteed to lose money.

I've worked on a number of projects where it was sold at a loss-- so we're told-- "come up with some cost savings, we're 5 million in the hole!"-- and we hear this in the kickoff meeting!

PM's are encouraged to save money, often at the expense of the company. If there's a way to come up with a bubblegum and baling wire design that'll only work this one time, they'll do it. And then it'll be sold to another project with no additional engineering time, guaranteeing problems for the next project.

Advice to Senior Management

Look for a business model that'll work in this decade, and does not assume customers fall over themselves to buy overpriced spares or media. Actually provide good service to the few customers that have signed service contracts.