Pros
- I dislike the 'we are a family' trope in businesses, but of all the companies I have seen QTS is the closest to actually acting it out. It's still a business that has to make business decisions, but if people get cut through no fault of their own they're taken care of financially. Management reasonably cares about people. - I've had several managers over my time at QTS and I've generally felt I had good direct managers. My current manager is the best leader I have had at any job. There are definitely some duds, but within the IT Operations team the bar is higher than other departments at QTS and higher than I have seen at previous employers. - Pay and benefits are in-line with previous jobs and are generally improving over time with one major exception listed in cons. - The workload is manageable and after-hours work is very low to non-existent. Even a few years ago this was not the case and has improved dramatically. - Business is growing at an incredible pace and appears to not really have a limit. - The department average time employed at QTS is probably somewhere in the range of 4-5 years while the average IT range is more like 2 years. This is personally the longest I've stayed at an IT job and I've been in the field for quite a while. - The current 'come in once every 2 weeks for in-person meetings and some free food' office policy is a good idea.
Cons
- Pay increases for 2021 performance were significantly lower than the cost of living increases that occurred. CPI increase was 7% YoY for Dec 20 - Dec 21 and the pay increase was...not that, even for top performers. Job hopping is already the easiest way to get a meaningful pay increase in IT, this isn't helping that at all. Everyone is now making less money in 2022 than they did in 2021, yet the company had "2x the leasing of our previous biggest year" - direct quote from the CEO. 2x the leasing results in making less money due to inflation, a fantastic outcome for the company but not the employees. I believe this is the first time I've not been satisfied with my performance increase at QTS. - The company is very raa-raa America, yet the pride and joy of the company is software produced by Russian developers who have been on the payroll for many years. A fantastic look even prior to the current geo-political issues. - At other tech companies it is near standard practice to cover the employee healthcare premium (but usually not dependents), this is the first job I've had where it wasn't. - Communication is an ongoing problem that no one in senior management really seems to grasp. There was a fantastic example recently where a company wide all-hands meeting was sent with 0 information, just the meeting invite. I happened to know what it was for, but most did not and it caused a lot of panic and confusion for something that was either irrelevant or a positive for everyone. I have found out we are building new datacenters from internet sites for REITs when we still haven't communicated internally what we're building and when. Blasting out emails from Chad isn't communication and neither is making 50 slack channels for each random special snowflake thing someone in executive leadership wants a room for. Even the half-hearted attempts we used to have at communication like a regular newsletter have just disappeared. A company of this size should not have communication issues, I've worked for corporations with 20,000 people that I felt like I knew what other teams were doing whereas I have 0 idea what's going on in QTS. We should be blasting out every big sales win, have an openly visible sales pipeline, metrics for how many billable hours DCO logged the past week/month, the number of tickets closed by the OSC, a clear list of what properties we have purchased and what datacenters are under construction with their expected due dates, or anything else that's progress. We don't celebrate our wins at all except on seemingly random occasions where Chad sends the company an email about something and it's almost always this incredibly campy, cliched speech that we could really do without. Please hire a communications director and let them loose on this problem, otherwise it's only going to get worse as the company grows. - There are a couple managers in the department that firmly fit into the 'seagull manager' category. I fortunately do not have one of these, but there are some in the department and they drag everyone down with them. Everyone knows it's a problem, but instead of attempting to resolve it we're just gonna drag these boat anchors to the finish line apparently. - The Blackstone acquisition might have been in the best financial interests of the shareholders (it earned me a good bit of money), but I am very concerned for the future culture within QTS. Blackstone and other giant Wall Street firms love to crow about things like ESG and DEI, but they're pretty openly destroying portions of American life in order to earn a buck. Blackstone buys billions of dollars of single family homes then rents them, pushing up the price of home ownership. They were very up front about wanting people back in their overpriced offices ASAP when others were still quite concerned about COVID in nearly 2021. If they start to push some of their ways of operating down to companies they own, I have the feeling I will be looking for other employment.
