Pros
The company provides a monthly stipend for health care after a few months of employment. They also provide free shirts.
Cons
This is not a job for anyone with a family or a social life of any kind. QNS is not a good fit for someone who already has experience in end-user support, nor is it good for someone who hopes to eventually learn something new. To say that I worked at least 60 hours per week every week is a conservative estimate. Such a work week was not at all what I expected after my "working interview," during which I shadowed a future supervisor for a couple of days and left work no later than 4:00 in the afternoon each day. Furthermore, I had two supervisors who were known for working from about 9:00 A.M. until about 2:30 or 3:00 in the afternoon. I would call them for help in the early afternoon and I could often hear their children in the background, so I knew that they were home already. I was told by more than one superior that QNS would prefer to hire someone with very little knowledge about computers so that he could be more easily trained to do things the QNS way. Procedures are determined by one or two guys at the top, are not updated frequently enough, employ long-outdated methods, and are not open for discussion. The company seems to have a goal of market saturation in Illinois and Missouri. To achieve that goal, they spread their employees thin; donate thousands of dollars of equipment to districts that can't afford to buy anything; and maintain relationships with districts that are more trouble than they are worth. Workers are expendable. The summer is referred to as "the busy time." During the summer, most of the "flips" are done: school districts that recently signed contracts with QNS are moved from their old systems to a standard QNS network. I participated in three such flips, and I could not believe the lack of organization I witnessed from a company that claims to have been in business since 1997. Yes, you are given a company car, but the company's cars are in notoriously poor condition. I was given three school districts that my predecessors had left in shambles. I worked long hours every day, I wasn't sleeping normally, and I wasn't seeing my family. I told anyone who would listen that my workload was not average and that I was overwhelmed. The company responded by telling me on my evaluation that I needed to work on my confidence and by giving me a fourth school district. I accrued both vacation time and PTO, but I was only able to use it in small chunks (a few hours at a time) because of my workload. I didn't understand why we had two balances for the same thing - time off - until I left, when I was compensated for my unused vacation time but not for my unused PTO. I was told that I should be thankful because I was on their Illinois side of operations; Illinois law requires the company to compensate for unused vacation time, but Missouri law does not.
