There are too many to list, but here are the highlights.
- You are not guaranteed a seat/desk, and all equipment belongs to UTC; in other words you have no control over the tools which you are using. If there is a network outage, you are responsible to find a computer that is unaffected by the outage. If there are no licenses (you will be working with customer licenses because QuEST pretty much doesn't own anything in the office), you are again responsible for finding a way to do the work, or make up the billable hours at a later time.
- Not a single division of the East Hartford office does any actual engineering work. You work on an outsourcing basis, meaning that you perform the work as the customer requests, not what is realistic/physical. The "analysis" instructions are given by the customer (Pratt&Whitney), and attempts to fix obvious problems therein are blocked/ignored. You are there to make PowerPoint slides (match one picture with another picture) and process documents (rewrite from one format to another).
- Your only purpose as an employee is to be billable so that the people above you become wealthier. QuEST has no interest whatsoever in providing platforms for you to educate yourself further or develop. The business plan is to hire desperate recent graduates who have no choice but to take the job, and then replace them when they quit within an average of two years. Currently, QuEST is hiring more workers than there is space in the office in addition to not having work for them to do - there is also no training because it cannot be billed to the customer. If you have to submit non-billable hours (no task or you use vacation time) you are expected to make those up so you have 40 billable hours each week.
- Compensation and benefits are well below market standards, but at the same time the work is not worth the value that is being charged for it; the work can be done by 13-15 year olds with very little cognitive or social abilities.
Only take a position here if there is absolutely no alternative, and if you do, start looking for a new job immediately (the majority of employees spend most of their day looking for a new job).
