iQmetrix Reviews

I can echo previous reviews citing concerns over limited opportunities for growth. If you are a technically minded individual with leadership and/or people management skills, and you'd like to become more involved in product direction, the opportunities are few and far between. All of the director-type positions that have opened up during my time have been filled by outside hires, while people already in those positions have been with the company almost from the start. Meanwhile, the more junior leadership roles have been filled via appointments rather than internal postings (yes, there is an internal job board, but the team-lead type positions never get posted there for an open competition). This has led to a dearth of people with technical competency in leadership positions where important business decisions are made. You can see this in iQ's current search for a CTO. The fact that a technology company can operate for years without a CTO says something about how senior management values technical leadership in the first place, while the inability to groom anyone internally for this role speaks equally well to the sort of training and mentorship that up-and-coming employees receive. Meanwhile, if you do work on a product development team, you'll quickly find that all of your priorities are dictated to you by management (in spite of iQ's promise of autonomous teams), and your timelines are set in stone based on whatever the clients have demanded (regardless of whether the dates are feasible). This has led to a culture of near continuous crisis for some teams, where you cannot work on long term objectives because you're too busy applying band-aids to the latest round of short-sighted decision making.

iQmetrix likes to advertise itself as a flat structure. If you want a role, just start doing it, and it will become your job. But almost a decade of experience at this company has shown everything to be the opposite. At iQmetrix, you need to rub shoulders with the right people in order to progress into new roles. Every single leadership position in the Winnipeg office has been filled by someone being tapped on the shoulder. I've worked on the ground floor as a developer, and as a team lead, but I got lucky being in the right place at the right time for that to happen. For other developers, their best hope is to keep working and hope one day someone takes notice, which can take years, if it ever happens. Couple this with the fact that the entire executive team is located in Vancouver, so there is no insight into the needs of the office at all. In terms of building products, it's basically split into two camps. iQmetrix has a flagship application which dominates the market, and essentially pays the bills of every other product that the company makes, as none of these other products turn a profit. Decisions on what to build and how are made in echo chambers by people in positions of authority, which based on how they got there, are typically people with zero product management experience. iQmetrix doesn't seem to recognize that they have a completely untapped pool of people who have worked on their products for years, and have something to contribute for making a successful product. If you want to progress into helping define what makes a product successful, and once again, you don't know the right people, just stop right now. You have no path of progression into this role.