PDQ.com Reviews

For being a software company there is very little software development that actually takes place. The core goal of a software company should obviously be developing software and harboring a brain trust that enables the company to output better, more sophisticated, products. At PDQ there is strong resistance to actually doing the work necessary to keep the products relevant and future proof. During my career there it became clear that the management was too afraid to take the risks necessary to modernize the aging products, unless those risks were being undertaken by one of the founders who wrote much of the initial codebase. This problem leads to a myriad of cultural issues where developer input on problems was undervalued and in some cases was overridden by other teams that had no idea what they were talking about. Another issue is that there is a tremendous amount of 'god worship' around the codebase as it is, and a defensiveness around honestly assessing its quality. PDQ still looks like a very young software company, but instead of being small and agile, it is already plagued by bureaucracy. They struggle tremendously with defining the problems they need developers to solve, and then are angry when the project takes too long and the output isn't what they wanted. Combine this with the fact that the development team is tiny, and it's easy to feel thrown under the bus and as if much of the company doesn't respect the dev team. I think PDQ could someday be really cool if they got a strong CTO that understands that the core of a software development company resides in its development capabilities and strives to harbor that, even if it means addressing some very inconvenient truths.