Aug 2, 2017
Ciena Software Engineer reviews
4.0
81% would recommend to a friend
Gary B. Smith
88% approve of CEO
71% positive business outlook
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Software Engineer || employees have rated Ciena with 4.0 out of 5 stars, based on 210 company reviews on Glassdoor. This indicates that most Software Engineer || professionals have a good working experience there. Ciena is rated in line with the average (within 1 standard deviation) by Software Engineer || professionals compared to other employers within the Telecommunications industry (3.6 stars).
Reviews by job title
210 reviews
4.0
Apr 15, 2017
Recommend
CEO approval
Business Outlook
Pros
The people inside ciena are really awesome and have tons of experience. You can learn a lot from them and they are ready to help you learn and deepen your technical skills. The workload is fair.
Cons
I did not find any to be honest. As long as the salary is good for you
4.0
Mar 18, 2017
New grad - lots of praise, but also some concerns
Current employee, less than 1 year
Ottawa, ON
Recommend
CEO approval
Business Outlook
Pros
Don't let my review title give the wrong vibe, in the few months I have been with Ciena I have seen quite a lot of positive things. There are some caveats/concerns though, but let's start with the positives. These include: -Flex hours: be productive, meet deadlines, attend your meetings. This is particularly important to me. -Telecommuting: WFH is supported (albeit support has been shoddy in the past, but there are very recently announced plans to make mobile workspaces a lot more accessible). -Helpful coworkers: seriously, people here are interested in helping. I have not yet met someone who turned me away, or gave a half-hearted response simply because the question I asked was too simple. -Lots to learn: the product is complex (I guess this could be a con depending on how you look at it...). It's a great challenge to learn and understand it, especially since there's so much you could potentially work on. -Signs of culture shift/continual improvement: new office building in the tech park in Kanata is nice; half cubicles vs. the 1980s style 6+ feet tall at the Carling office (where Nortel once stood), more common areas (still not enough), modern office feel, larger cafeteria, slightly better organized floor plans (can still use improvements), lots of parking. The new cafeteria also sounds to be very promising (much better than what was offered at the old office). -Benefits/comp: fairly well rounded and competitive benefits package from SunLife, especially for (I believe) job offers in Canada (save for a few SV tech giants with satellite offices in Canada). Stock purchase plan and pension plan exists, the base salary alone is market rate + a little more. If you include the bonus then I would consider it a fairly competitive (seriously) salary, given the low(er) CoL in Ottawa (again, notwithstanding the few SV tech giants that exist here). A nominal relocation amount provided as well. 3 weeks vacation + 5 paid sick days, and company shuts down during Christmas break (paid). -Location: new office is much more centrally located to food, public transport, and general amenities like trails, bicycle paths, and stores as well as other technology companies.
Cons
-Work/life balance: yes, flex hours exist, but there is so much to do (and as far as I can tell, a lack of manpower to do it) that you will be often staying late. It is not uncommon to see more than a handful of people staying past 7pm, and very often I see a decent amount of people still at the office at 6pm. Of course, no one is forcing you to stay, but deadlines need to be met. -Coding style: varies from team to team. There is no company-wide standard, which is frustrating; everyone (okay, at the minimum every team) does something different, and there is a LOT of legacy code. -Culture: mix of a lot of inherited Nortel employees sprinkled with new grads. Unfortunately you won't be finding a silicon valley type environment here, there are not many young hires (they exist, but we are numbered). The upside is this means your team will likely be able to support you easily, but at the cost of a culture hit. -Technologies: generally speaking, very out of date. This is expected as Ciena acquired a part of Nortel; however, the tools (in my opinion) are REALLY starting to show its age. There is a transition process to move to newer tools, but it seems to be taking an extremely long time. IT tech also feels lackluster - there are recent plans to eventually let employees pick their laptops on refresh (starting this year), but that remains to be seen. Mobile computing options can be difficult since the dev environment is Linux, but the current laptops run Windows. -Nicheness: if you're looking to be a SDE generalist like many SV jobs, then I would give this a second thought. You will learn a lot about embedded development and develop a great sense of low-level stuff, but my opinion is that these are niche skills - career progression is a concern if you do not want to stay with embedded development forever. A lot of work at Ciena is interfacing with hardware and making hardware work reliably; paradigms like OOP/Functional programming/etc. are not practiced (unless you're on a team doing much higher level design). -Pay (and to some extent, responsibility) transparency: the lack thereof, really. Not many are comfortable talking about it, and as far as I can tell there is no way to find out the pay (or even pay range) that comes with promotions. Promotions seem to be based on experience, but there's no HARD criteria (to my knowledge) on the skills that need to be met for this to happen. Almost anyone at the company for more than 2 years will be either SDE 2 or SDE 3, unless you proceed to management. The determination of seniority (before you hit the management ladder) seems to be very subjective.
Viewing 187 - 189 of 210 Reviews
