Trading Technologies reviews

I recently left TT after having worked here for several years. Here is my personal opinion on what’s wrong with the company: This used to be a good place to work. I remember looking forward to coming to the office, because we were solving interesting problems. Through engineering, we were providing value to our customers and enabling them to be more successful. We liked what we were working on. All of this changed when Rick Lane became CTO. Rick hated everything about TT’s culture and made it his personal goal to change it. Instead of leveraging existing talent and taking advantage of what was already built (ya know – the whole “standing on the shoulders of giants” thing), Rick decided to throw it all away and start from scratch. There is nothing wrong with this approach per se, but the execution was simply terrible. He created a new team and right away encouraged the “us versus them” mentality. It was not fun watching my friends work on a new project that was going to “replace us all”. While Rick’s inner circle chugged away re-writing the existing system, the remainder of the company was busy paying their salaries. People supporting the legacy system did not get any recognition, while Rick’s team was given bonuses under the table. We all became frustrated and eventually bored with our jobs. What was the point to all of this? What happened to fairness? How about career development? The funny thing was that even “the chosen ones” shared our frustration. I guess rewriting the same code over and over and over in different programming languages is not very exciting. Rick would force implementations on them, openly going against their professional judgment. Those 3 months at Google hardly made Rick Lane an engineer. His technical decisions always seemed to backfire so, naturally, he made the developers be “on-call” to answer phone calls and fix the broken, hastily written code. We all started asking – why are we doing this to ourselves? These are the best years of our twenties! Top talent quickly started to depart. People who helped run this company for the past ten or so years. Rick’s response was something along the lines of “I was expecting to see more people quit by now”. Obviously he did not respect any of us. The saddest part? Almost every developer who decided to put in notice had to fight the legal department. TT’s non-compete agreement is completely one-sided and very broad; it covers pretty much anything. Other companies pay you if they decide to assert the non-compete. TT seems to be okay to see you starve. The “preferred” way of getting a release letter is to surrender your hard-earned options. This is cruel, since the company did not pay bonuses (I hear they started now). If you enjoy working for management who treats you like an overpaid typist, ignores your opinions and encourages you to forgo your options, do not hesitate to apply. There are dozens of new openings :)

Work-life balance has been shattered in the past year or so. In the past, one of the big benefits of working at this company was that you could put in your 9-5 and not worry a bit about work until the next day. There was the occasional end of project crunch, but nothing that was for an extended period of time. The company's *excellent* phone support staff handled all Level 1 type incidents, problems that were escalated were usually okay to wait until the next day. All hands on deck fire drills were exceedingly rare. Now there is a pressure to put all waking hours into the company. I've seen non-urgent email threads go on until 12:30AM on week nights. Senior staff will email on the weekend about non-critical internal development environments being down. I can tell from our issue tracking software that any given weekend between 4-6 developers are working. This past weekend was Labor Day weekend and we had 14 different people do some work. Email threads went on until 10:45PM on Saturday. On Monday, the emails started up at 8:45AM. This has created a work environment where if you're not responding to non-urgent after hours emails or working weekends you are falling behind your peers. Putting in quality work five days a week is no longer enough to maintain your position. There has been a steady trickle of firings for the past couple of years, so falling behind your peers isn't just a missed opportunity for a larger raise. Simply performing instead of over-performing can definitely mean losing your job. This is the environment of a high-paced startup, but the company is not a startup. There is a stock option plan but no roadmap to going public. Company is large enough that there is still a bureaucracy, there is a small chance you will influence decision making, and you will work on the same thing indefinitely. The company is on a long term course to get smaller and smaller, so it is not as if you stay on for five years you're going to accidentally find yourself in charge of a large department because the company took off.