- STRESS: I haven't even been here a year and I am well and truly burnt out. Work-life balance has become an impossibility. Management celebrates working long hours and weekends and it's become ingrained in the Q2 culture that to succeed and be recognized, you have to surrender your free time. Managers insist that employees are in charge of their work-life balance, but employees (especially in engineering, implementations, and support) are being expected to deliver more than they possibly can in a 40-hour workweek to keep up with volume. Q2 offers flexible PTO that in theory should let us recharge, but in practice I find that my coworkers and I use less than we would if we had a set allotment. Personally, I'm afraid to take days off even when I'm sick because of the crazy workload that will be waiting for me when I return.
- Organizational chaos, poor training, and wishy-washy job responsibilities: Upper management is in constant flux. We've had 2 new executives leave within a year. About half of the middle-managers seem really engaged in their teams, but the other half don't have a clue what their subordinates are up to on a daily basis. This might be because there has been so much turnover and new hiring at Q2 lately-- a lot of people are new and don't know how they fit into the company. Add that to the total absence of new hire training for some teams, and you get a really fantastic mess of people who don't have a clue what they're doing. And because so few people have clear expectations of what they're supposed to be doing and there are too few trained bodies to do everything that needs to be done, everyone wears a lot of hats they didn't sign up for.
- A get-it-done mentality that pushes out poor-quality products: I suppose this depends heavily on what product you work on, but I've seen some pretty shoddy work delivered to clients because an engineering manager wanted to meet a deadline or QA was understaffed. It feels terrible to love what you do, but not be proud of the finished product.
- Poor growth opportunities... unless you are on a management trajectory: There's so much chaos at Q2 that there's a real need for smart, capable people to take control of wayward projects and processes. But if you want to grow as a developer or IT professional, it's hard to really make much progress with all the organizational disarray and bizarre management decisions. And performance-based pay increases are not happening...
