Pay: Let's start with this one. The pay at RQ is standard or a little higher or so it seems at first. Pay would be solid if you had a standard 40-45 hour work week but this won’t be the case. It’s expected that you will work at least 10 hours a day. They can’t outright say this, but if you work less you will be devalued in your quarterly reviews and told you aren’t helping the team enough. I know several employees that work routinely 12-14 hour days without any additional benefits. So whatever pay you are offered, take off 25% of your hourly earnings because you won’t be working 8 hour days.
Work-Life Balance: Don’t even consider working here at all if you have a family, friends, or any kind of social life. They only want workaholics here, it’s expected that you are on call at all times. It doesn’t matter if you’ve just worked a 14 hour day and it’s 2am, if there is something they want you for you are expected to be there. The only saving grace is that when you are on PTO you are allowed to turn off slack and email notifications. Good luck getting any PTO approved though.
Communication: Hope you like being talked down to and treated like you don’t know anything in your area of expertise. Regardless of how much experience you bring to the table if your ideas do not match the ideas of leadership they will be disregarded. There will be no discussion, no reasoning given, just a simple, “No we aren’t doing it that way”. Communication only flows one way at RQ and it’s not in the employees favor. You will be lied to about the direction of the company, what is expected of you, what career paths you can take, opportunities you have to grow, etc. They will lie through their teeth to keep you here for as long as they can, but they have no intention of keeping any promises made.
Code Practices: Do you think it’s a good idea to push untested code straight to production environments that customers are actively using? If you answered no, then you are in opposition to the thinking of the current leadership. They will brag in their team channels that they are pushing code straight to Production. Not only do they routinely skip quality checks and reviews, they also have multiple P1’s a day. P1 being defined as a customer unable to login or not able to see their data. This being one of the finest examples of incompetence of the current leadership. Some of the bugs being released to production allow the bypass of security checks on users, and we’ve even had a fun bug where they gave full access to all customer data to every customer. Luckily these have not been caught by the customers yet, but if one of those major bugs is seen by a customer then someone is going to pay the price and it isn’t going to be leadership.
Big-Brother: The idea of privacy of any kind is not held at RQ. Everything you do will be monitored and questioned. They will watch and read your slack chats, they monitor when you are active in slack, they monitor when you move cards, how many points they are worth, how many you move a day, if you participate in a code review, if you comment on a code review, etc. Literally everything you do is recorded, watched, and will be questioned. They will tell you in group meetings that this is for your own benefit, that they monitor these things to make sure there are no blockers so that you can do your job as efficiently as possible. However, if you try to get obvious blockers removed that are literally blocking you from completing your assigned duties and they don’t want to work on those blockers they’ll just tell you to work around it and not be blocked.
Micro-Management: I have only on one other occasion ever seen a company that is as heavy with micro management as RQ is. As stated earlier they don’t care how much experience you have they will monitor projects at every step and “correct” your “mistakes” daily and if you try to fight it you will just be ignored or overruled. When their corrections come back as a major problem or blocker later on, you will be blamed for allowing it to happen.
