QRM Reviews

I have been working at QRM

Pros – Good team work, supportive for professional growth, low pressure, long term focus, very stable work environment, very friendly work atmosphere, great location and office space

Cons – Not as dynamic work environment as in trading firms, compensation upside is limited because of the nature of the company's business

Yes, I would recommend this company to a friend

I worked at QRM

Pros – good benefits big vacation training

Cons – small company less opportunities conservative

Advice to Senior Management – n/a

I have been working at QRM

Pros – 1. Smart, highly educated, young group of employees.
2. Good compensation.
3. Great culture of a daily short update meeting to let team members know what you are working on that day.
4. Lots of very helpful people for the most part.

Cons – 1. The cons revolve mainly around the fact that senior management have so little trust in their employees such that it curbs the employees’ productivity and work motivation while increasing frustration in the work place.
2. Working hours and work location are not flexible at all. e.g. employees can access their workstation from home, but those hours working from home will not be considered working hours if you hadn't been present at the office sometime during the day, which sort of defeats the purpose of working from home. In my team, there are at times urgent work that need to be completed by monday morning therefore requiring some work to be done over the weekend. Many times, on such occasions I prefer to skip the hour long commute into the office on a weekend and decide to just log in from home. But of course, by not being physically present in the office, the time I had spent working from home cannot be counted as work hours. This is another example of how management has so little trust in their employees and is always skeptical of their employees working from home. It is almost as if the option to work from home is there as a facade for the company to say that they provide flexible work hours and promote work-life balance.
3. Management's reason for severely limiting internet access is the fear that employees may spend their days surfing the web instead of working. However employees are not given internet access even when it is needed to complete a work related task. Instead, employees can access the internet using the very few kiosks located strategically on each floor. Imagine trying to do some extensive work-related research and literally have to work out of the kiosks or otherwise making 20 round trips to the kiosk from your work desk. Files downloaded from the internet are not easily transferrable to our workstations either. Strictly restricting internet access to only Wikipedia and programming websites and not allowing internet access even when truly needed for work related purposes is just another reflection of QRM management’s paranoia.
4. Many access privileges are only given to those who have been at the company since its founding days. No matter how talented/hardworking/smart a new hire may be, he/she will not be granted these privileges until they have been at the company for a certain amount of time. Another way to get privileges as a relatively new hire is to befriend the right people with the power to provide access privileges and quietly bypass company policies. Many people leave for a better place where privileges are given fairly to everyone and employees do not have to proof their loyalty to the company through decades of service just to earn something like having unlimited internet access or access to relevant proprietary information.
5. For a such a small company, QRM is a very bureaucratic place. Many of the ultimate decisions are made by senior management. Because of the layers of bureaucracy, processes tend to take awhile to be completed especially when one person drops the ball or the one person becomes the bottleneck of the whole system and is so overwhelmed by the tons of approval requests he/she has to review. This adds to the mounting frustration that QRM employees are already subjected to.

Advice to Senior Management – 1. Put more trust in your employees. It will only encourage productivity, initiative, and increase motivation. If you can’t put any trust in your employees then why hire them in the first place?
2. Reduce the red tape required for minor internal issues. Reserve that for more significant issues.
3. Listen and consider what your employees have to say when it comes to what’s best for the company. In our performance reviews, we are required to write suggestions on how to improve the company but you don’t seem to read them at all. Stop being so aloof to the majority of your employees.

No, I would not recommend this company to a friend

I worked at QRM

Pros – - good compensation and benefits
- very relaxed, stress-free, casual work environment
- young, smart workforce
- leader in its industry and very academic in nature

Cons – There is very little opportunity for career development and growth. QRM recruits smart talented individuals from great schools by promising opportunities in risk management consulting. In reality, the company is primarily a software vendor that is operating in cash cow mode. New analysts will either work the help desk troubleshooting bugs or work on a development team testing the software. The amount of true intellectual work is limited. You'll probably learn a fair amount about the industry but after a couple of years you max out and your job will never change.

Leadership at QRM is horrible. The decision-making is concentrated in a handful of individuals and there is very little communication from them. Universal complaints and frustrations are routinely ignored. Most of upper management are smart people that have been around since the founding days of the company but are not cut out for managing or inspiring people.

There is a lot of frustration throughout the company and it's created a somewhat toxic environment.

Advice to Senior Management – Management needs to start taking employee feedback seriously. It could improve employee morale by rotating people through different functions. Unless the company ventures into new endeavors, it also needs to change it's recruiting methods. They try to recruit smart people to do unrewarding work.

No, I would not recommend this company to a friend

I have been working at QRM

Pros – For developers, compensation and bonus is good. Talented people work here and keep up with latest technology. Stress level is low. Typically, you need to work only regular work hours (45 per week) and only on rare occasions need to work late hours and weekends.

Cons – Benefits (mainly health) are bad. Exact opposite of honest and open communication. Senior management is not strong. Even if 12 inches snow or you have a severe headache, you are expected to be in the office or take a time off; you cannot telecommute. Forget about being sent to external training.

Advice to Senior Management – Encourage open and honest communication. Provide clarity, avoid vagueness; avoid backdoor arrangements. Upgrade health benefits. Embrace more liberal telecommute policy. Avoid pitting senior managers against each other; strive for synergy.

No, I would not recommend this company to a friend

I worked at QRM

Pros – Work load is ok. Usually there are not many deadline to meet

Cons – Career growth and learning opportunities are very limited. My feeling is QRM has reached its peak and there is not much room for it to grow. All good positions are occupied by those "loyal" people. Senior management didn't encourage employee to learn, so some talented but not so loyal people has left

Advice to Senior Management – Put focus on retain your current employee

No, I would not recommend this company to a friend

I have been working at QRM

Pros – Work life balance is good. The hours are not very long and there is almost never deadlines that require after hours work.
The people that work there are smart, nice, and relaxed.
The software is cool can be used for good stuff.

Cons – They do not encourage learning. No one can use the internet not even for research of to go to finance.com for example to learn about current events in risk or regulations that apply to your work there.
There is no communiation from senior management about what is going on. You just have to wait and see.
You get no feedback on how your career is progressing at QRM

Advice to Senior Management – Just communicate better with the staff and allow them opportunities to learn so they can grow their career.

No, I would not recommend this company to a friend

I worked at QRM

Pros – QRM hires bright people, so you get to work with some good talent. While I worked there, I grew by leaps and bounds as a software developer.

Cons – QRM did not know how to properly use its bright people; they routinely had overqualified people doing ridiculous things. For example, they had a PhD in optimization basically doing project management. Ouch.

Advice to Senior Management – Leadership needs to better utilize its talented people. Routinely, people are not enabled to do their best work. When I was there, my hands were routinely tied.

I have been working at QRM

Pros – Over the past 10 years, the company has grown in conservatively and employed smart people with good backgrounds. Combined with some great work in the pipeline it is a joy to work at this company, increasingly so since we moved down the path of creating a happier atmosphere by trimming the fat and gently nudging productive employees who were an imperfect fit for us to seek opportunities where they will be happier.

The company has been doing its best to keep all employees happy. One way was in providing bi-weekly company-wide luncheons where everyone got to talk on an equal level to create a great dynamic that often continued around our well-stocked kitchens. The conversations usually ranged from recent sporting events to discussions about current work. These discussions now occur in our cubicles and offices where we have the freedom to talk about almost anything we like without monitoring.

Another reason the firm is a great place to work is the great raises and bonuses it has been giving even in the last few years while the market was down.

Cons – Career advancement is slower at QRM than at other firms because the company prefers to be careful to only promote loyal employees. Internet access is also limited and tracked until you have proven yourself loyal and not distracted by the information overload.

QRM's requirement to fill out time cards that add up for 45 hours a week (including time to fill out the card) is strange until you figure out that overtime is also tracked this way.

Advice to Senior Management – Continue down the current path, everyone who doesn't fit the company's philosophy has left or is leaving. We will soon have a combination of capable happy people to direct and less competent people pretending to be happy to perform the grunt work.

Yes, I would recommend this company to a friend

I worked at QRM

Pros – Compensation is lower than some financial firms in Chicago, but comparable or better than other firms with similar workloads. The work/life balance is quite good. Standard 45-hour week, and almost no pressure to put in more time. I never received resistence when asking to use my vacation time.

On the technical side, QRM does make an effort to support using newer technologies. There are some very talented developers and technical managers here.

Cons – It's a pretty flat organization, but I was still very isolated from senior management. You receive pretty much 0 information about how well the company is performing. Draconian Internet access policy. Raises and bonuses are still around, but they are not nearly as impressive as a few years ago. Requirement to fill out time cards that add up for 45 hours a week (a bit weird for a non-billable salaried position). Lots of talent has left and QRM is slow to replace, if they replace at all. Relies almost exclusively on recruiters for new talent, which greatly limits the talent pool. The review process never puts you in contact with the people who actually decide your raise/bonus.

On the technical side, QRM also has some technical managers who aren't keeping up with industry best practices. Many make decisions to get things done quickly, instead of getting things done correctly. Some of the developers are also pretty mediocre.

QRM feels like a company on it's way down, and senior management seems to have no desire and/or ability to change anything to stem the bleeding.

Advice to Senior Management – It's really not that complicated; when almost every developer who leaves the company tells you the same thing, maybe you should actually listen and implement it.

No, I would not recommend this company to a friend