Q2 is currently trying to become profitable and that's been rough on the employees. In late 2018 it was announced all pay raises would be put on hold. Some employees did finally get raises halfway through 2020 despite still not being profitable but I honestly think that has more to do with COVID-19 and trying to recover lost morale rather than putting employees first. I would not be surprised if something similar happens in 2021.
Weekend work will happen and it will likely happen on very short notice. Management has rationalized this by saying we have an open PTO plan to make up for it but due to workload very few people are able to actually utilize the unlimited PTO to make up for the lost weekends.
Q2 has grown very quickly and we're at a weird point where we have some massive customers that can dictate how we work. Because of this it doesn't feel like projects are run very efficiently and we're constantly rushing from fire to fire based on the whims of our largest customers. If you're placed on one of these projects it can be very disheartening very quickly. Management also seems to only want to keep the client happy without care for employee morale.
Q2 is also very segmented. In implementations we work in several different pods, some of which have wildly different responsibilities. Project managers struggle to understand what pods do what and this leads to a lot of internal conflict. In my experience because of this a lot of technical positions that have been with Q2 for a while tend to take ownership of parts of a project they should have no involvement with solely because the PM doesn't understand who should be doing what work.
Upper management changed quite a bit between 2016 and 2018 which really set us back, we're just now recovering from that and it's not uncommon for folks around the office to still complain about those turbulent times.
We tend to celebrate near misses rather that good jobs being done. Every quarter we have an all hands that has an awards component to it. Each aware always has an anecdote on how the awardee did something above and beyond to rescue a project from certain failure. These aren't things that went well, these are projects that were neglected until the 11th hour and then a majority of the project was done in the final 2-3 weeks. We don't seem to learn from these mistakes and glorify the pain that these team members went through. If you work on a team that runs smoothly you'll most likely not be noticed because everything is running smoothly.
