Pros
It’s difficult to find a better company if you just want to coast to retirement: new hires start at 23 days PTO, most managers have a liberal WFH policy, there’s a pension, etc. Stability. CME has exclusive rights to list some of the world’s most popular financial derivatives and lobbies aggressively for its interests. Great exit opportunities in finance and tech.
Cons
Demoralizing amount of red-tape. There is little financial incentive to over-perform. Target bonuses are small for the industry and little separates the highest and lowest performers, compensation-wise. Company-wide architectural decisions are made by the least qualified/most politically-connected, leading to brittle and unresilient systems. The tech division is rapidly turning over FTEs. The most motivated/talented engineers have been flocking to HFT and BigTech for a few years, and are subsequently backfilled with contractors and fresh college hires. This seems to be the conscious strategy going forward; let attrition take its course and hire armies of cheap foreign contractors to be trained by the one or two remaining holdouts.