Quark Reviews

Pros

The people you work with at Quark are phenomenal. Very smart and hard working. Best part of the job is the opportunity to work with great teams and on interesting projects.

Cons

Management is terrible, especially upper C-level managers. Very little information sharing, pitting teams against each other, very "old school" management style.

Pros

The mountains are close by.
The weather tends to be enjoyable.
Denver is a nice place to live.
You can get decent experience useful enough to get you a job at a real company.

Cons

In hindsight, its hard to describe which you'd rather do: Be homeless or work here. I've talked with a number of former co-workers who feel the same. Nothing I was told when being recruited was true. Nothing. I started wondering why does a company recruit people like that? Immediate disillusionment.

A management situation rife with nepotism, incompetent cronies. A downward spiral. Layoff after layoff after layoff. Awful, depressing, negative atmosphere. Dysfunctionality everywhere, with petty grudges and turf battles. Out-of-depth product leadership. After working there, a new job felt like I had just been released from prison. At least now I don't get the shakes on Sunday night.

Advice to Senior Management

Leave. Perhaps recent new owners who bought it will clean house and bring in professionals who actually have a clue.

Pros

Nice work environment
Cutting edge technology
Good products.

Cons

Don’t know how to sell the products.
No focus on employees and growth opportunities.
Sales going down.

Advice to Senior Management

Pay attention to your key resources and find way to sell.

Pros

Great Company to work for and learn a lot.

Cons

Not good Pay masters among the others in the same area

Pros

Good co workers to work with and competitive salary. Nice support from team leads and overall a good experience working with architects and team leads

Cons

Company could not catch up with the competition although there were resources and money available but lack of innovation from product management caused it to drown.

Advice to Senior Management

Company could not catch up with the competition although there were resources and money available but lack of innovation from product management caused it to drown.

Pros

Very fantastic place to work. Good work life balance.

Cons

Not a good pay master.

Advice to Senior Management

Not as such.

Pros

1) Good benefits
2) Good learning curve.

Cons

1) Highly unstable.
2) No direction.
3) No long term vision of the company.

Advice to Senior Management

Do innovative, the way Quark was known to be.

Pros

The people working there are committed and creative, and interact very well among each other. Communication between the workers is very positive, and there is always time for a business discussion. Pay is good, and benefits are still OK, although they have declined in the last few years.

Cons

The environment can be chaotic, and changes happen all the time, sometimes with very little notice so that any sort of preparation is virtually impossible. The current mantra - "everyone is either sales or sales support" is simplistic, since the sales groups have been largely ineffective and incompetent over the last 10 years. Also, product focus is a fleeting thing, and some products suffer terribly for lack of commitment and are victims of "this is the next best thing and we will only work on this".

Advice to Senior Management

Take better advantage of the skills and knowledge of the people who are in the trenches every day. You hired an amazing number of VP's who the rest of us couldn't discern any value in.