There are better opportunities elsewhere - Software Engineer OptionMetrics Employee Review

Thank you for your extensive comments. As CEO, I’m glad to hear that you at least appreciate the work/life balance! I want to respond with a few thoughts and some objective data. Let me start with your last point, which pertains to compensation. We do our very best to ensure that our employees are compensated fairly, that they participate in the successful growth of the company through end-of-year bonuses, and that they have many and varied opportunities to grow and advance their career within OptionMetrics. I’m not sure why you think that “it is not hard to find employees who are dissatisfied with their pay”, but if it is truly the case, then they must not be sharing this dissatisfaction with the people who are in the best position to change it: their manager, or me directly. And if they did bring it up to me, we would have an honest discussion about their current compensation, their goals, and how we can help them realize those goals. I promise, I’ve never thrown anyone out of my office for asking for more money! But I honestly don’t know what to do about an employee who carries a grudge about feeling under-compensated and doesn’t share his concerns with his manager or with me. I’d be happy to hear your feedback on this. We have had a higher turnover rate in the company than I would have liked over the last year. But you are way off in your suggestion that it is “around half the company”, or that the year before was “probably” worse. The job market in NYC right now for skilled developers is very competitive, and sometimes that means that our developers are approached with other opportunities soon after joining OptionMetrics. A job is about more than total comp, and I like to think that our work/life balance, opportunity for learning and career growth, and fantastic supportive team members gives us a competitive edge over some of the other opportunities out there. Either way, we continue to strive to look for ways to improve the incentives for our team members who might feel that they are not getting all out of OptionMetrics that they are looking for. Yes, we have had our share of bad hires, and we have learned much over the years regarding the interviewing and hiring process. I have tremendous confidence in my managers, as I do my employees. Blaming “poor management” is too easy and not really very credible nor helpful. You say that the work “can be interesting but is primarily dull”. Our core business is to provide analytics and visualizations of financial data to our customers, to allow them to better understand risk/return tradeoffs and make more intelligent investments. We are not building flying cars or spaceships, or neural networks or blockchains. The technical challenges here involve being able to run extensive, mathematically intensive calculations on extremely large data sets and coming up with useful summaries and analyses. If that’s just not your thing, I understand, but at OptionMetrics we have solved, and continue to solve, extremely challenging technical problems. Everyone here on the technical side is given the opportunity to learn and grow and participate in the advancement and implementation of our technology solutions – no one is held back. And yes, the CEO (that’s me) is an active participant in the technical side of the business, working with my developers to understand our challenges, suggest ideas for solutions, and provide direction for new tools and technologies that might be useful and relevant. It’s odd that you refer to it as a “dictatorship”, I think that “mentorship” might be a more apt description. Overall, it sounds to me like this position just wasn’t right for you, and you decided that it would be better to leave the company rather than try to figure out how to make it work for you. I’m sorry we did not have the opportunity to discuss this in person. I wish you the best of luck in all your future endeavors, and I hope you find what you are looking for.