SQA has changed dramatically for the worse since I joined, and they are only continuing to go downhill. Declining business, managerial incompetence, and self-sabotage have made SQA a sinking ship, and the current CEO seems to like it that way.
SQA brands itself as a close-knit family. It certainly used to be 20 years ago, but those days are long gone. It’s a boys club and it’s a money club—and more and more, it seems that the preferred club members are those with a record (or at least a digital paper trail dark enough to make your jaw drop).
-- CORRUPTION AND HARASSMENT --
SQA supports corrupt businessmen and silences everyone else. Leadership at the company includes multiple people fired from their previous companies after losing millions in company funds in a scam, being involved in the harassment of lower-level employees, and being investigated for the murder of another employee. Other members of leadership openly abuse SQA funds for personal gain; others still have been known to harass, manipulate, and even assault coworkers without retribution. These same members of the leadership team are of course in charge of the bonuses and laying-off of those they harass.
I personally witnessed harassment multiple times and heard about it directly from victims many times more. Victims were not limited to women—There was inappropriate language and touching directed at both men and women during my time at SQA.
I spoke up more than once about many of the issues above, as did others. In response, SQA told its managers to find ways to get people to stop talking about it. They took every chance they had to silence those who wanted to talk constructively about office culture, company values, and power dynamics. This includes laying off people who spoke up about toxic work culture. People had already quit prior to the lay-offs and had cited specific people and harassment as their reasons for leaving; the exit interviewer basically shrugged their shoulders and said, “That sounds about right.”
People at every level will admit to knowing about the harassment happening at SQA. No one does anything about it. The one time people reported harassment, the harasser wasn’t punished and was actually later promoted.
-- MOVING GOAL POSTS AND MANIPULATION --
The executive team will do anything to keep their paychecks ridiculously high while keeping everyone else’s low, including constantly moving goal posts, ignoring problems they find inconvenient to solve, and hiring friends and family to other upper-level positions so they can have a close-knit club of people they trust at the top to keep everyone below them where they are.
SQA implemented a new set of rules and new format for annual performance reviews every single year of the five I was there. They let employees work towards goals based on one set of rules, and then they pull the rug out from under them shortly before annual reviews by changing the format/rules.
They tell everyone that annual raises are based on performance, but I was later confided in that the performance reviews were not used to determine raises or any sort of benefit—everyone gets the same amount (give or take a half percent) regardless of the work they accomplish. They would tell us to work extremely hard to be eligible for a good raise, and then they would give everyone the same meager raise anyway.
-- MANUFACTURING A FALSE PUBLIC PERSONA --
Most people looking for a job at SQA will never learn about any of the above issues beforehand. Why? Because SQA strategically manufactures and removes online company reviews. They have part-time offsite contractors submit positive reviews instead of full-time onsite personnel. These reviews do not get anywhere close to an accurate snapshot of what it’s like to work at SQA. SQA is also known to try to remove negative online reviews (largely from full-time employees) so their clients won’t see and so they can keep hiring people under the guise of being a caring and trustworthy team.
SQA does not care about being a sustainable business, providing quality services, or looking after its employees. The only thing SQA cares about is exploiting power and hemorrhaging money for the benefit of a select few. This company is what happens when little boys are never taught shame.
My advice? Run as fast as you can from this cesspool and find yourself a company that respects basic decency.
