Qvest.US Reviews

Employee churn was always high. Recently the Austin office laid off 10% of its workforce. These were well liked staff members and engineers with three or more years at the company. Once again the culture of fear is palatable. The owning partners said the laid off employees were "under performing". The partners also said it was "resizing". The layoff points to the consistent poor handling of engineering talent by management. Management got greedy and over hired? Yes. Perhaps they took their eye off of filling the work pipeline? Yes. Place the blame on other people? Yes. Consulting companies are notorious for off-shoring engineering work. The partners are former consultants who are repeating the pattern because, like the big consultant firms, they view engineers as disposable.

At the IDC, you will become an “OpenText Media Manager expert” and tasked with creating plugins, data migrations, installs, upgrade, or customization for this legacy software. Don’t believe the hype around innovation, internal products, or entertainment industry. Projects are as boring as they come. Consulting is a significant part of daily work including estimates, client headaches, meetings, spreadsheets, deadlines, client calls, and more meetings. Some projects feature more consulting tasks than engineering work. Engineering best practices often do not happen because of lack of billable resources, single-engineer projects, non-technical PMs, deadlines, and demanding clients. Stress is a huge problem. Lucky engineers get boring projects. Unlucky engineers are assigned projects that feature excessive meetings, zero influence, unrealistic deadlines, unqualified PMs, frustrating clients, and projects unrelated to their skillset. Many projects have a consultant acting as project managers, and making decisions they’re not qualified to make. Some engineers work 2 to 3 projects at once. A 2-person project was so miserable that 3 engineers quit in less than 6 months. Management pretends to care and hypes change during team-meetings, but never follows through. Engineers have minimal project influence, and estimations are broken. Typically unqualified non-technical consultants, managers, and clients determine project specs and rough estimate without engineers, then demand for rushed estimates and waterfall style project-plans with little notice or information, which later becomes deadlines. Finally, a word of warning about overtime. Only hours billable to a client over a quarter qualify. You will rarely see overtime due to fixed-bid projects, vacations, sick days, unbillable company activities, and gaps between projects. The IDC isn’t a terrible place to work, but below average for Austin.