Average company with some nice occasional projects, but many problems. - Software Engineer ComTrade Employee Review

Cons

- Some projects involve hardly anything beyond menial tasks or dull bug fixing in a support role. Such projects have no space for creativity or professional growth. - Salaries tend to be below market competition. - The company doesn't seem to value experienced professionals, nor is it willing to pay them. Above-average developers can have a hard time finding challenging engineering problems. This, combined with lower-than-average entry salaries, has resulted in many talented people leaving the company and a high turnover rate. - Mismanagement of talent. I've seen many young engineers or students assigned menial tasks with management somehow expecting that they will become great through repetitive mediocrity. - Promotions are not based on competence, but almost exclusively on politics and tenure. People who are not aggressive, or don't have a supervisor who will be aggressive for them, are at risk of being seriously lowballed. At least until they realize that and end up leaving. - Constantly changing and reversing political direction and areas of focus - the company has a deep identity crisis. This makes it very hard to specialize in anything due to very real prospects of being re-assigned at a whim to unrelated projects and having to learn a different technology every 6 months. - As with many large companies, there is lots of corporate lingo and fancy business talk which seems to be valued more than raw technical competence - technical accomplishments are not acknowledged. - Isolation between teams leads to constantly re-inventing the wheel and zero code re-use.