Pros
Flexible Decent colleagues Started out as a great corporate culture and great colleagues One of the better IT service companies in the local area... (Does not necessarily mean they are "good" at what they do)
Cons
I came to DQ to fill an IT manager roll. This was a logical step coming from a senior systems engineer roll. I came from another less than successful local MSP that suffered from a lack of long term planning for customer environments. I liked that DQ had a dedicated IT management team that focused on high level planning and maintenance for customers. Things were great at first, then over the course of about 9 months things started to change, there was increasing pressure for automation, without understanding that the strategic planning aspect of what we do cannot be automated. As well as automating the tasks that we were doing monthly would have taken away our institutional knowledge of these customer networks. The whole reasoning behind the changes were growth. Management/ownership wanted to grow and their plan for growth involved automating tasks so that they could downsize that team from 10 people down to 3 supporting the same number of customers. The flaw in this was that the automation never really came to fruition, and those 3 people were doing the work of the 10 person team. Of the 3, 2 left of their own and the other was forced out. Simultaneously, while this was happening they opened a branch office in the Philippines. I assume in order to exploit the labor rate differences. However, they hired the cheapest labor they could find in that labor market as well, which lead to a lot of frustrated employees and customers dealing with the incompetency, as well as language barrier. While this train wreck was happening, several people voiced concerns about the decisions being made, pointed out the flaws and suggested alternatives. Ownership, simply dismissed any and all concerns and refused to even hear them out. I understand as a business owner you have the right to make the decisions you make, even if they are driving your company straight into the ground. Over the course of my 2 years there, approximately 25 highly competent senior level IT engineers left to pursue better opportunities. They were either not replaced, replaced by inferior local staff, or replaced by inferior remote Philippines staff. Entire PM staff has been replaced via attrition by remote Philippines staff. Low middle pay scale aimed at getting Jr. or mid level engineers, then milking them for a few years before they move on. Terrible health insurance options.... I understand some people like High Deductible plans with the HSA, However, traditional Copay insurance is vastly superior. Ownership says "all companies are switching to this model" No, respectfully, they are not. Other companies offer it as an option, but still have a more expensive traditional insurance as an option as well. The fact that they don't even provide a more expensive option just reeks of ownership greed. When I first came there, they had these automated vitamin water dispenser machines as well as good keurig cofee makers. They eliminated the vitamin water under the guise of "health" . I later found out they eliminated both to save money. The new coffee was swill. Data center has no fire suppression. Data center has no funding to upgrade to appropriate quality equipment to meet the service level sold to customers. lots of single points of failure.
