Pros
I started my career at Ciena in June 2018, I was hired for a ‘Software Engineer – New Grad’ position. Ciena has provided me with great experience and learning opportunities. From the beginning of my position here, I have been treated as capable individual contributor. Within my first week, I had already submitted a code change into the platform. At Ciena I am given the trust and autonomy to break things, make mistakes, learn, and grow. Along with having autonomy in my position, I also get to work closely with some incredibly intelligent and experienced individuals, some who have been in the telecom field for longer than I have been alive. When I started, I was a little intimidated working on a team with so many experienced developers, but they all welcomed me, my fresh ideas, and are happy to share knowledge and information with me. Ciena has done an excellent job of making me feel validated in my contributions and capabilities. In my just over a year of tenure at Ciena, I have already been the head of an internal build-infrastructure project. Me and one other developer were responsible for building a continuous integration platform for the product I work on. This product has been deployed to the product’s whole development team and dozens of individuals use the tool every day. As stated above, I started as a ‘Software Engineer – New Grad’ but my current position is now ‘Software Engineer 2’. Ciena is constantly providing me a learning opportunity to grow and become a better developer. They are also capable of quickly recognizing growth and experience in their employees and promoting them accordingly. * Recognition of performance * Great local culture * Connected global company culture
Cons
* Long hours sometimes * Big company and associated red tape / policies * Pesky IT
