Good Coworkers - Rapidly Growing Company At Expense of Employees
Pros
- There is free stuff - They actually do pay you pretty well - Most of your coworkers are not douche-bags. There are a lot of nice well-meaning people, and I've made some friends that make work a lot more enjoyable.
Cons
NOTE: I left Q2 about 6 months ago, but I Imagine it hasn't changed much Issue with being Public and Growth Problems - There is always more work than can physically be done and no managers seem to fully grasp the stress that produces for the people beneath them. They are just in their office looking at reports hoping there is positive news to share with the people above them. There needs to be much more of an emphasis on simply listening to your employees in earnest to gauge where everyone is at. Salesforce reports are tools. Not lifelines. - They just reward exceptionally speedy performers (which not everybody can be) and that's not the sole determinant of whether you are good at your Job - PTO doesn't matter even though it is unlimited because you don't want to take off because work will be so piled up when you return that you have anxiety on your vacation (which defeats the whole purpose) - They say its not a 45 hr a week job, Its a 50 hour a week job and you should know what you signed up for. But for a lot of people its actually 60 hours, sometimes more. I can see how that would be worth it if you were doing really fulfilling projects you had ownership of. However, the nature of the company is that we tailor products to the customer's liking, and your are always at the whim of the customer wants. Either that or if you in support you just move from one broken thing to the next. - It is honestly rare to go through a week where something isn't completely on fire. That is not an exaggeration. - They will host a big luncheon once every quarter (called a town hall) to tell us how well things are going, but all upper management would have to do is walk around and look at the bags under people's eyes to see that their cutthroat approach to growth is only benefiting one party: the board. It's arguably hurting the customer the most because they receiving such rushed service. And that inevitably causes problems down the road because an add-on was not implemented properly (or maybe even at all). - Ultimately, the sales team executes so much faster than we can hire and adequately train new people that there really isn't anything we can do to maintain equilibrium. That's why they so aggressively tout the motto "Change Is Good". It's even on our key-cards and lanyards. The tenet absolves management from trying to create any sort of stability and work life balance for employees. In fact, that would be counterproductive in their eyes because if there weren't ill-advised monthly department reorganizations and insane rushed mass roll-outs of unfinished products then that would somehow suggest we were stagnant as a company. Operating smoothly is anti-growth. You aren't going fast enough if the workplace is not chaotic is essentially what I have gleaned from that mentality. Issue with Mid-Level Management - They refuse to fire people. They are too forgiving. I do not know why. Can't figure this one out. I think it's a part of the whole Q2 Culture thing. Like "we are in this together". This creates environments where incompetent people cause problems that high-performers must now expend energy on. That's true everywhere, but it is especially exacerbated due to the fact that people who literally cannot do their job stay there for years (and are even promoted in order be moved out of departments so they are someone else's problem). - Mid Level Managers are managing technical workers with absolutely zero technical knowledge themselves. This means the very tools they need to judge whether a situation is serious or not is does not exist in their skill-set. As a result they will either have to believe the customer or their employee at face value if their is a disagreement (or if a customer is being unreasonable). Because the people below them for information on issues, this can obviously lead to superficial decision-making processes where they are essentially conjuring their own opinion of someone else's. Because of this Managers typically stay in their offices all day because they are not useful on the floor. - I will say there are SOME that are skilled at delegating and fighting for who they oversee, but as a whole they represent redundancy. - They should have managers who have dual roles of both supervisor and technical adviser that can actually help with problems rather than pointing at it and saying "please fix it as soon as possible". That is not a role within a company. That is a sentence. We all know it needs to be fixed. It's not working. - I will say that despite all the inefficiencies and incompetence. It is not a malicious atmosphere. People are generally polite and nice. That doesn't change the fact managers can't really help you other than get higher level contacts involved when necessary. Last Point - The Technology is dated - If you are looking to further your career, I would go somewhere that would be more of stepping stone into modern tech. Q2 is not that. Q2 is a good place to go if your really fresh and you want to get your bearings straight and make some friends a long the way. It's not going to properly equip you for the rest of the industry in a robust way. It will challenge you though! The application is so customizable that the solutions and problems are not static, so in that sense it really does test your critical reasoning abilities. You are always encountering a convergence of issues you have never seen before and have to work backwards from there.
