Chicago Trading Company reviews

Hard to break through new areas - leaders need vision and commitment. Communication overhead is excessive - some fake jobs are created for the sake of efficient communication that end up doing the opposite; too many layers of middle management, people need to do real work. Spend way too much time on goals and devs and planning, things move slowly.

Codebase suck. People suck. Management suck. Bonus suck. systems crash every other day. Endless support issues. Systems have to be rebuilt often because of tech debt and performance. Smart people want to leave as soon as they join. Mind you, this is a place that has been around for 30 years yet it is still many years behind top competitors and have barely scratched the surface of high frequency trading. It used to be a java shop transiting very slowly into a C++ shop with many old and incompetent fools running the show. Management does nothing all day except meetings and meetings while most of the work is really done by a handful of people . You have seniors with 20 years of experience who don’t even know how to write low latency code. And you have young seniors who can’t even build something that don’t crash in production. Most people come here for retirement or can’t get a job elsewhere. There is no merit. Only people who are the friendly with the management gets favored. That’s one of the many reasons why the better engineers are leaving