Work can be really boring. The nature of the business requires that they are extremely cautious with putting new code into production. This leads to very slow development cycles, and a pretty huge amount of bureaucratic busy work. My number one complaint here is that most of our work revolves not around designing and implementing new features, but trudging through an outdated and overbearing system of red tape to get anything done. There are hard rules around deployments to different environments and an insane amount of energy and effort goes into just managing that process. And for some reason this is all the responsibility of developers.
Middle/high management obviously does not care in the slightest about best practices or any standardized processes for software development. Most of the code and systems in place for testing, deploying, etc are a complete mess. But most teams are barely staffed enough to get their work done on time so there's never any opportunity or incentive to improve processes.
CME also claims to care a great deal about their employees, always boasting that they are on some such "Top 100 Best Places to Work" list. And emphasizing their dedication to diversity. But the reality is they put bagels in the lobby and a ping pong table in order to look like an employee focused tech company when all we want is competitive salaries and regular raises. In my years at CME I don't think I have come across a single black developer. I have many female colleagues who feel they are mistreated, talked down to, and dismissed by their older male coworkers. I also know of multiple situations where mistreatments of this kind were grossly mishandled by tech managers and HR staff resulting in an ostensible "solution" to the problem that actually just made the employee who was harassed very uncomfortable in their work environment going forward.
During the pandemic, while CME was making billions of dollars in profit off of their employees labor, they made the decision to slash all promotions and raises for their employees. During this same period, CEO Terry Duffy's compensation rose ~30% (4 million dollars). As a consequence, from what I am seeing, there is a large exodus of talented younger tech employees for greener pastures. Plenty of other companies, especially in this space, offer higher wages and more interesting work. But you will certainly have to work harder at those places.
