Pros
The people who work at the Toronto office are all great. They are all very intelligent, hard working, and a pleasure to work with. Based on anecdotal feedback of other offices, the Toronto office seems to be much more casual and laid back.
Cons
A summary of the points I detail below in each respective paragraph: - Very long turnaround time on interview process - Low office morale & misguided leadership - Unreasonable demands - Lack of transparency - Lots of bureaucracy - Pisa office valued more than Toronto office. I conducted developer interviews while employed at ION Trading. For development positions, candidates will typically go through 2 or 3 interviews. The interviews can be done fairly quickly. If, after these interviews are conducted, it is agreed that the candidate would make a welcome addition to the team, final approval must be sought from a high-ranking member of the company (typically the CTO or CEO,) and an offer letter must be drafted by legal. These final steps can literally take weeks and weeks. We often had people tell us they took other jobs by the time we got around to offering them offers. The morale in the Toronto office has seen a sharp drop over the past couple of years. The current day-to-day operations and approach to development feels very broken, misguided, and inefficient. Recent high-level management changes have put someone in charge who is placing extremely unrealistic expectations on developers. There has been a large increase in staff turnover as a result (the development team has decreased 50% in size over the past two years.) Priorities change all the time. One day a great deal of importance is placed on a certain feature, only to be told a few days later that something else has taken priority. Little to no warning can be given when this is about to happen, which makes planning and actual development very difficult. Productivity is also very low due to these regular context switches. Touching on the point made in the previous paragraph regarding the drop in team size, output demands aren't adjusted to reflect the decreasing size of the development team. Team members are expected to simply "work harder" or to "just get it done" by the same deadlines. Obviously this can't be done, and members are often scolded for their inability to make miracles happen. ION Trading is not a transparent company whatsoever. You have no idea what short-term planning is happening. There is very little communication between the product backlog owner and the developers. You do not know about upcoming changes until they're dropped in your lap. (ION purports to use SCRUM. They use a very broken SCRUM, and do not regularly adhere to it.) There is no communication between the higher-ups and the rest of the company. ION is highly bureaucratic. Decisions can't be made unless they're discussed with relevant decision-making teams, members of which ask their respective development teams, who may have to ask for details from external teams. Decisions usually do get made, but not until months have passed. While the Toronto office does do development, the majority of the developers in ION reside in Pisa, Italy. Many of the decision makers and developers-of-influence work out of this office. Toronto developers often feel that they are not valued by the Pisa teams. Often decisions are made without consulting people in Toronto. Sometimes development changes are made that break software maintained by Toronto, because they simply forget to test it against our code. It's usually up to Toronto developers to fix the issues. There is clearly favouritism for the developers in Pisa. Concerns fall on deaf ears. Also, in terms of career advancement, it is difficult for developers in Toronto to advance their developer career, as all of the larger and more complex libraries and software are developed and maintained in Pisa.
