The Truth about Darren Jer - Anonymous employee MarketFactory Employee Review

- The company has great potential in this space as there is no single company that does FX IT well - Very smart group of and experience people which you get to work directly with - Everyone's work has an impact to the bottom line - Very dynamic environment which makes the day to day more interesting - Direct access to very senior counterparts and banks, hedge funds and ECNs - The culture is Improving overtime as the team scales

- Live trading is a tough IT environment to run - Very demanding clients since we are running live trading environments - You can feel all of the stress of a trading as if you were working on a trading floor

* Free lunch one day a week * The current director of software development is a mensch (I worked with him when I was there). He is committed to doing the right thing despite the general toxic nature of the company. * The paychecks haven't bounced yet * Many interesting problems to solve

When I worked at MarketFactory there was no work-life balance. From system startup Sunday afternoon at noon NY time until Friday 5pm NY time we lived in fear of two things: the unstable technology doing something to prevent a customer from using it and the whims of the CEO, Darren Jer. It's also worth noting that all system deploys and maintenance happened between 5pm Friday and noon on Sunday, so forget about things like "summer Friday" or a relaxing Sunday if you work at MarketFactory. At least when I was there. Maybe it's better now, but I doubt it. Darren is a hostile, manipulative guy, a horrible manager, not a leader, and he has anger management issues. When I was at MarketFactory, there was no culture to speak of and no effort to create a comfortable, inclusive environment. If you work at MarketFactory be sure to set boundaries with Darren. You'll definitely need to manage up. It's also worth noting that they had trouble retaining sales and marketing people, and that almost the entire customer success team in NY quit during 2017. Darren will say "those people self-selected out" or "they never were A players anyway" but the one common denominator in all this is Darren. Make your own conclusions.