Revolving door, hostile environment, dead-end job.
Pros
Casual dress code. Decent coffee for free. The head of the company seems nice and is trying to keep the "family feeling" going, even though it's now owned by a conglomerate.
Cons
A small core group of unfriendly individuals make all the technology and architectural decisions so you don’t get a say in anything and will be lucky if you get any details about how you are supposed to do your work. Nothing is documented, the specs for tasks are a complete joke (literally a few words), and they change the requirements constantly so the developer is blamed when it’s done wrong. Scope creep is a way of life in this department. Since this core group has worked at Quiktrak for so long they lack experience with modern technology and they try to hide their inadequacies by making fun of everything outside of their tiny world. This has lead to some epically bad decisions making their systems are a total mess of bandaids and hacks. They have most everyone outside of the department fooled into thinking they are some kind of cutting-edge technology team; this couldn’t be further from the truth. A full review of their practices by their parent company is needed badly. The rest of the department is treated like second class citizens so they speak only when spoken too and aren’t assigned any interesting or meaningful projects to work on, only “tasks” (i.e. bugs or tiny enhancements). It’s pretty obvious management has a general lack of trust of the individual and their skills. As a developer, you are treated like a replaceable contractor. You might be told to change something another developer just worked on (or is still working on), so there’s no sense of ownership or expertise in any of the code, which might be intentional. This leads to the developers stumbling over each other and massively inefficient methodologies. Making things worse, there’s plenty of times when the CIO assigns the same task to two separate developers, usually with conflicting instructions, just because he “forgot”. And why the CIO is directly handing out development tasks without the software manager’s knowledge is yet another problem. Other lowlights: Inconsistent expectations and treatment by management from one employee to the next. Employee performance reviews are the time when you find out that you’re doing something wrong and that it has already affected your raise and bonus. Quiktrak’s overall turnover is shockingly high which implies the tech department employees aren’t the only ones who aren't happy there. A developer with any experience should avoid this place like the plague - you won’t be treated with any respect, you will be frustrated that you can’t apply your knowledge, and you’ll want to gouge your eyes out when you see the terrible way their systems are implemented. Anybody who wants to use them only for experience, understand that most of what you’ll “learn” there conflicts with many best-practices so the skills aren’t transferable and you’ll waste time un-learning them at your next job.
