Trading Technologies Reviews

Pros

Free breakfast every morning, pretty good benefits package, and a hand full of some of the brightest individuals I have had the privilege of working with.

Cons

There is generally a lack of true innovation, motivation to do better and lack of accountability in engineering. Many employees seem to not believe in the success of the company

Pros

- People that I worked with are Awesome
- Casual Environment
- Game Room
- Flexible work hours
- Convenient location

Cons

- No professional or personal growth
- Serious (pay) discrimination between client and server teams.
- You are not recognized (pay) for the work you do
- Sometimes your team consists of 2 Principal Engineers, 3 Sr Engineers and 1 Associate Engineer. (Yeah. Seriously). Guess where the project then lands up (recycle bin)
- Casual dress code (which mean tank tops and low cut blouses are allowed). This makes it uncomfortable to work
- It can get loud around you.

Advice to Senior Management

- Listen to your employees
- Improve communication between teams
- Organize the teams well (1 Principal, 1 Sr Engineer, 3 Engineers)
- Split QA and Dev
- Do not make Dev do the testing (wait... Outsourcing QA are we?)
- Please consider the employees opinion when quoting project dates.

Pros

Relaxed, flexible work environment feels comfortable and social. Managers usually approve time off without fuss. Highly regarded in the industry.

Cons

Various departments are poor to coordinate with each other and operate a little too autonomously from each other. Current management isn't as supportive when it comes to technical training.

Advice to Senior Management

All areas need common leadership that can make them work together as one single company. Some old habits have outlived their useful lives.

Pros

Fun group of coworkers. Good benefits. Flexible working hours and they are accommodating of taking time off. Free breakfast in the mornings.

Cons

No room for professional growth. Career advancement very limited due to the small size of the company and the very niche market it is in. No real direction for long term vision of the company.

Advice to Senior Management

Listen to the customers more. Also, they need to better define goals and stick to the plan for delivering solutions to the customers.

Pros

casual work environment
great soft benefits (breakfast, quarterly party, fitness club compensation)
competitive salary
fun coworkers
company/job stability
Industry leader for the products being developed

Cons

No reason to do a good job ... no rewards or recognition for doing well, on time, with quality. Not penalized for being late with poor quality, so what incents me to do it right the first time?
No overall corporate direction or vision that has been communicated to the organization.
Nothing to get motivated about, lots of status quo efforts.
No sense of urgency or accountability for work being performed.

Advice to Senior Management

Start holding people accountable for their work. Measure their success or failures. Applaud and reward their successes. Give them direction and a vision they can stand behind.

Pros

Talented people
Good work/life balance
Office location right above train station

Cons

No bonus at all.
No reason to stay more than two years.

Advice to Senior Management

This company does not hae vision. No growth.

Pros

Good Work Life Balance, compensation is competitive. Its a very "young" culture (average age is probably 30). Co-workers are pretty good.

Cons

Company feels over staffed for what it produces. This causes too many turf wars and people feeling like they need to prove their worth.

Advice to Senior Management

It is unclear to me what the goal of the company is. I don't have faith that management is happy running a software firm. We seem to focus on a lot peripheral businesses.

Pros

A good mix of Experience and Young people make this a good company to work.
Very Understanding about family life.
Relaxed atmosphere.

Cons

Salary is Too low.
No Bonus.
Not enough Challenging work.
No recognition.
Not much interaction with the management.
Goals are never well defined.

Advice to Senior Management

Should have more interaction with the Engineers, trust me there are some great ideas out there.Increase salary, TT gives our very poor compensation, wont be able to retain good talent with a meager compensation. Start some challenging projects.

Pros

Good benefits, salary, and work/life balance. Low level management is fairly harmless and you will find a number of very smart people. For the most part you will get a good feeling of ownership on your projects and encounter interesting problems. However, it is very easy to get pigeonholed after you become an expert in a certain area.

Cons

Two main problems here. #1 - senior management has no idea how to run a software company. They are constantly making famous, well-known mistakes that you can read about in Mythical Man Month. There are some smart engineers here and their ideas are summarily ignored by upper management. E.g., they make senior developers do QA jobs (literally, write and execute tests!), give software process and project leadership to project managers who have no software background. It can be quite frustrating and ends up diminishing morale and enthusiasm.

#2 - while there are many smart engineers, there are too many poorly qualified engineers and testers. Unless you're really bad, you won't get let go and every gets promoted/raises despite their performance. This ultimately lowers the good engineers' value. There were countless times that good engineers came up with brilliant solutions only to be told to "dumb them down" because others might find them too complex.

Advice to Senior Management

First and foremost, replace the CTO with one who knows about software. That means they need a computer science background, need to have been a developer in a company, know about software process, need to be a programming expert. Second, remove the cruft - they're only slowing you down. Listen to the good engineers, promote them, let them lead... and get out of the way - stop micromanaging.

Pros

Great location. Some good people that make an honest attempt to look busy. Pays well above market. Willing to take a risk.

Cons

Management team has no idea how to run a successful and profitable business with employees who REQUIRE a challenge. CTO will often advertise that if you want career development, then this isn't the place for you. Yea. He said that.

Advice to Senior Management

If other companies have been doing business a certain way for a long time and are successful at what they do...they must be doing something right that you could learn from.