Pros
Good training and collaborative work environment that will rapidly get new employees comfortable debugging, writing, and designing computer code. As others had said, regardless of the position you are hired into, you will be working full time on software. Considering the size of the company, Quorum's software is well structured and maintained entirely in house. This makes it a very strong platform for people looking to build a foundation in software development. The object oriented software front end with an Oracle or SQL Server back end is a very very common and in demand software structure. Skills developed at Q are highly transferable.
Cons
First, long hours. The Q treats all work on a by the hour basis, and they expect all employees to clock 9 hours a day. 9 billable hours (time spent at work truly working) is extremely demanding when you're paid a fixed salary. Combine 9 hours with a commute to downtown, lunch break, stepping out of the office to make a personal call, etc, and you can kiss your free time good bye. Second, unreasonable project management. Quorum sells news features to clients based on an "estimate", which is a rough project outline, and number of hours that the project will take to finish. While I understand that having a way to record what fraction of your time was spent on different tasks is important for estimating schedules and billing clients, having a fixed number of hours in which to do software development is terrible. Computer code is a complex logic puzzle, and any additions to that puzzle requires both logic and creativity. There are many ways to solve a problem, and sometimes those solutions manifest quickly and organically, and sometimes they're a long slog of ideas that didn't pan out. Putting a hard timer over such work is effectively setting employees up to fail. Third, inconsistent management. Due to the long hours, and often unreasonable projects, employee turn over is high. The result is that the management team is not always the best leaders and most skilled developers, but often whoever's survived the longest. Large differences in management styles is common, and can cause "office space" like moments where I had 3 different "bosses" on a given project, all telling me slightly different things. My time at Q was heavily marred by projects with unrealistic timelines and expectations. Despite scoring "greatly exceeds expectations" on my year end reviews, I was ultimately laid off, and was told the decision was due to "performance issues". I'm not sure how to rectify those two facts.
