Pros
Questrade has been able to attract several talented people. It does this by paying somewhat decent salaries and promoting employees quickly (too quickly?) to their level of incompetence.
Cons
-Talent is wasted by managers that have never written a line of code in their lives. -Questrade is a financial services company that is new to software development. -Projects are rarely completed on time or on budget. Project management is completely ad hoc. -Technical teams often work on weekends without compensation or days in lieu. -QA teams are understaffed and see very high turnover. -Poor technical management. Key decision-makers and stakeholders are not technical people. -Managers are unable to assess the skills and abilities of the technical staff. -Surprisingly few opportunities to learn about the field of investing. -Issues with morale across the entire company. -Nepotism is prevalent across the company. -The company is unable to learn from past mistakes and continues to make the same ones, over and over again. The last point is especially problematic. The company culture at Questrade is one that does not deal well with mistakes. Rather than accepting fault for a bad decision, managers seek out a scapegoat in order to protect themselves. This has the secondary effect of delaying important decisions for as long as possible. The project I worked on has been in active development for over 4 years and was expected to launch 2 years ago. If one is moderately skilled at software development, they would do well to steer clear of Questrade. And for those, like myself, who made the honest mistake of joining the company--no doubt with the best of intentions--it's time to dust off those resumes and go work for a real software company. The feeling of wonder and excitement you will experience when you release working code to real customers is like no other.
