The culture is bad. Opinions are not valued.
The compensation is mediocre. No more stock grants.
The opportunities to learn and improve your skills are not good.
The "bonus" is arbitrary.
The culture is very top-down. Absolutely no accountability going in the other direction. Expressing opinions of any kind not strictly related to what you're working on, is discouraged. The company is very cheap about very dumb things. The bean counters are firmly in control to the detriment of everything else.
ICE bought NYSE some years back, and on the NYSE side the perks remain better and the NYSE people seem to be treated with a little bit more respect and decency.
How they handle the New York Holiday party is a small but illustrative example of how this company devalues culture: Rather than have a venue where we can all get together and bring a guest, which is a real team-and-morale-building event (which is how it was done pre-nyse, some years) they choose instead to cheap out and ruin it. They host it on the NYSE trading floor, which, frankly, is a horrible venue. But it costs nothing! The party is actually two parties, on different days, because the space isn't big enough. There are NYSE and non-NYSE parties. For the NYSE people, they can bring a guest. The ICE people cannot bring a guest. To me it seems like ICE management would rather just not have a party and spend zero dollars, but especially in this time of economic expansion, to cancel the party would open the company up to ridicule. They don't want ICE to be seen as the company that canceled the Holiday party despite being rich and successful. But they should just cancel it because the way they're doing it probably does more harm than good.
More significantly, last year they stopped giving out stock grants as compensation. they increased people's targeted bonus by some amount that doesn't come close to making up for it. Since the existing grants all had a 3 year vesting period, we're now in some diminishing returns territory, so you can count on a lot of people jumping ship soon.
This is a financial company, and so has this banking-style bonus culture that is different from non-financial companies I've worked for in the past. How it works is: you have your salary, and then there's a targeted bonus which is a percentage of that, that you will get some proportion of, depending on your performance. Its supposed to be dependent on performance but I've found it to have very little relation to how hard I've worked or how well I've done. There have been times (I had this explained to me by a trusted manager) where it was much more largely affected by some high roller in your group leaving the company at just the right time, thereby making it so the pool, per remaining employee, is larger.
