iQmetrix Reviews

Cons

Wage could be better if compared with other companies

Cons

Lots of politics. Will recommend that company only for junior specialist or as a temporary place to work.

Cons

The company went through a restructuring last year which involved team changes and layoffs. The morale was very bad at the time. I left the job because I wasn't motivated and challenged enough in my team. Depending on which team you join, you may have great growth opportunities or none at all.

Cons

One of the biggest challenges of not having strict formal policies for everything is communication. The company has some fluid and organic ways of operating to avoid being stagnate and stale. Unfortunately, this can cause some issues with employees understanding things from time to time. They have invested allot of time and money to improve this.

Cons

One major thing would be the work environment, sometimes the people there act very childish, rude and sometimes very sexist. While I am no prune sometimes my lead takes it to far with her jokes, or aggressive manner in the way she calls peoples names or berates them. It is hard to tell sometimes how to take it. It is hard to talk to the right people about it as if you worked there you would know.

The company is great at saying, you are free to do stuff, you are free to be noticed, you are free to take the initiative it is nearly impossible to do with the amount of road blocks that exists. Not saying it can't be done, just really hard to do.

The company is good for the first 2 years however after that, you are stuck in that position unless you are good at sucking up to the right people.

I am glad that I got the experience that I did at this company but I am also glad that shorty, my path will be moving away from the company.

Cons

There was almost too much flexibility for tools and processes. I experienced individuals becoming siloed based on the comfort of their own workflow, and sometimes it developed duplicate or redundant work.

Cons

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.

Cons

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.

Cons

Small town politics.
Poor communication.
Us vs them attitudes between different departments.
limited budget for IT infrastructure.
Management lacks confidence and the projects that lack of confidence on to their subordinates.

Cons

Huge disconnect between people and teams in different offices

Lots of people are silently disappearing (being fired) while upper management is telling everyone their jobs are safe and no one is being let go.

Outward image doesn't reflect reality