Defence Science & Technology Agency Reviews

Current Employee – been working at Defence Science & Technology Agency full-time for more than 7 years

Pros – - Work-life balance
 - Helpful colleagues
 - Good starting salary
 - Many cheap and good eateries around office

Cons – - Limited opportunities to explore other business functions
 - Red tapes
 - High level of secrecy
 - Only non-camera phones are allowed

Advice to Senior Management – To have tie-ups with the industry to rotate staff to other business functions in other companies in the industry.

Yes, I would recommend this company to a friend

Current Employee – been working at Defence Science & Technology Agency full-time for more than 7 years

Pros – Good start for career. Provide good learning opportunities, learning experience.
Pro-family working culture.

Cons – Tones of paper work and red tapes

Advice to Senior Management – Reduce the red tapes

Yes, I would recommend this company to a friend

Current Employee – been working at Defence Science & Technology Agency full-time for more than 7 years

Pros – - Many training opportunities
- Good starting pay
- Friendly and approachable colleagues

Cons – There is substantial amount of paperwork for almost everything. Things tend to move slowly and can be frustrating at times.

Distribution of work can be uneven. Those who do well are often rewarded with more work.

Yes, I would recommend this company to a friend

Former Employee – worked at Defence Science & Technology Agency full-time for more than a year

Pros – Believes in work-life balance, convenient with shuttle bus to food centres.Benefits and compensation were rather attractive. Good starting point for fresh

Cons – The organisation is quite elitist and biased towards scholars and those who did well academically in their schoollife, though work performance seems to be also taken into account.
But some staff were really good at playing "taiji" pushing work around. Some were always uncontactable, even though they appeared to be present.
Some of the staff, though highly educated, had scholarships,were quite snobbish and were rude to staff, also highly educated, but were from other companies, contractors insourced to help them, hurling insults openly at them unnecessarily at times.
Ironically, the contractors were graceful and maintained their composure.
Camera phones, videos not allowed.A lot of red-tape and bureaucray.

Advice to Senior Management – Improve the staff retention. reduce turnover rate, not necessarily good.
Learn to retain and apppreciate your staff, like giving them some inside mobility.
Need to educate your staff to give insourced staff proper manners, they are not slaves, they are also like you, though maybe slightly less advantaged only for now.
Are you sure camera phones need to be completely banned?

Yes, I would recommend this company to a friend

Current Employee – been working at Defence Science & Technology Agency full-time for more than 7 years

Pros – exposure a wide variety of challenging tasks, some may not even be in your domain of knowledge
competitive salary and good salary benchmarking
policies and guidelines in place to govern quality deliverables
lots of learning opportunities in business and technical skills
improving focus on individual career development and staff retention
flexible hierarchical and project team structure

Cons – management 'have good risk mangement skills' by constantly loading the employees who can deliver
policies and guidelines in place which consume a considerable amount of project time
multi-tasking skills required
need effort to handle past, present and future projects as and when necessary
senior management aims to push for individual career development while middle management are constantly overloaded with projects and places lesser emphasis on the individual aspirations

Yes, I would recommend this company to a friend – I'm optimistic about the outlook for this company

Current Employee – been working at Defence Science & Technology Agency full-time

Pros – Nice working environment
Nice colleagues
Good Pay

Cons – Since it's a government agency, bound to be not as flexible

Advice to Senior Management – Need to pay more attention to the salary grade

Current Employee – been working at Defence Science & Technology Agency full-time for more than 10 years

Pros – Good training opportunities in the form of courses, scholarships.

Cons – Poor career prospects for technical roles. More rewards for managerial roles.

Yes, I would recommend this company to a friend

Former Employee – worked at Defence Science & Technology Agency as a contractor for more than 7 years

Pros – fresh grads get higher pay than those who join with <5 years work experience
slow pace (esp with all the red tape)
good place to retire
if you can't get your work done, it will be passed to someone else, you won't be fired

Cons – cannot use camera phone
lots of red tape
high turnover among those who haven't received their 10 years long service award

Advice to Senior Management – good job at retaining staff

Current Employee – been working at Defence Science & Technology Agency

Pros – Decent starting pay
interesting technical job

Cons – Pathethic pay increment
specialized skills that are not too marketable
extremely low staff engagement and morale
slow career progression
very high turnover
very thin middle management, and thus minimum guidance
excessive bureaucratic red tape
empty promises during staff conference
long working environment due to high turnover and understaffed
Excessive security restrictions
Top management is in his ivory tower and out of touch with the ground
some users can be very demanding and unreasonable

Advice to Senior Management – listen to the voices of the ground, discard your air of arrogance and remove the word 'engineer' from the job designation, better pay package

No, I would not recommend this company to a friend

Current Employee – been working at Defence Science & Technology Agency

Pros – Work life balance and competitive pay package in junior years.

Cons – Matrix hierachy, alot of red tape and increasing work processes and guidelines to follow.

No, I would not recommend this company to a friend