Pros
New bright/clean offices. Nice co-workers, some good managers. A potential opportunity to learn about Credit Default Swap Clearing business (just clearing, not trading/pricing) from the leader. Some interesting new technologies mixed in with the '80s Perl code. Lively office location/neighborhood (albeit slightly inconvenient for suburbanites). Good discounts at some local restaurants. Occasionally Hollywood movie filming in the area.
Cons
*This review specifically applies to "ICE Trust LLC" which is the OTC Credit Default Swap clearing house for the Interncontinental Exchange. This employer exhibited some red flags when several senior people left in 2010 after only working there a few months (< 6 months on average). Notable departures include a Senior Software Engineer, Systems Analyst, QA Lead and one (of two!) DBA. As this is only about a 40 man team, the overall level of attrition was disturbing. ICE TRUST sold itself as a growing company with a need for "senior" people which turned out to be rather false as new ideas were rejected or at best shelved "until later" as impossible deadlines kept the focus on things that needed to be done yesterday. ZERO work-life balance. Technologists were routinely working on the weekends to release software to Production. The good engineers were (privately) praised for working round-the-clock Citadel-style. In fact the pace of change proved too rapid and the group ended up making some costly mistakes and was put on "timeout" by Atlanta management. Some serious inter-group dysfunctions, in particular their Quants would rather not work with anyone outside of their Ivory Tower which was quite contradictory to my experience with Quants at other financial institutions. Overall their SDLC and other methodologies were weak and fragile as compared to my previous financial employers. Code was branched ad nauseum, very scary situation. They were forced to bifurcate their system in order to gain first mover advantage in 2009 and a looming high-risk code merge awaits them in 2011 (more off-peak work hours for sure). QA team seems completely marginalized as are their other analysts, I would be surprised if half of them didn't quit in 2011 post-bonuses. The performance of a software team can be partially ascertained by the relative contribution of their non-developer auxiliary teams. As such this place gets a D minus though it's NOT the fault of those individuals, they are smart and work hard. Rather, something completely fundamental is broken and the tail is pretty much wagging the dog here. Management quality varied greatly. Overall managers tended to focus on "managing up" rather than growing and coaching their own team. It was hilarious watching people scramble to enter their *2010* career goals in the month of DECEMBER (at the END of the year)!! ICE offers ZERO tuition reimbursement support, quite unlike their cross-town competitor (CME Group) and other major financial institutions in Chicago. At ICE TRUST it seems "Career Development" = "What have you done for me lately?" If you're considering going to ICE Trust, CONSIDER ANOTHER COMPANY!! You've been warned.