Pros: Good salary. Nice building. Friendly colleagues (for the most part). Free snacks. Open communication.

Cons: You don't know what the REAL project requirements are until they are 3 days from due. Have to work with stupid financial market conventions that make no sense. The code written here is terrible, and nobody has the time to police it.

Pros: It has a great R&D training program, which gets you ready to do some real programming tasks.

Cons: Chasing fast but sometimes could be cheap solutions, which may cause bigger problems later. Maybe different teams are different, but at least in my team, rarely do I see people put effort on code refactoring. I personally feel that the open floor could be very distractive to me; earmuffs would be your good friend.

Pros: - Junior hires are given a good load of responsibilities. - Salary and bonuses are good. - Free snacks are provided (better than Microsoft, worse than Google). - Customers are satisfied. Having worked at other companies, the high level of customer satisfaction is abnormal and deeply rewarding. - New York City is much more fun than San Francisco, Boston, or Seattle, but that's just my opinion ;).

Cons: - No offices. - Time not as flexible as other tech companies. - Expected to be on call after hours. For IT/networking/systems people, this may be normal, but as a software engineer, I was not used to this. - Culture of kissing up to higher levels (worse than other tech companies, but better than most non-tech corporate environments). Many superficial efforts are made to combat this, but it is still present. - No company cafeteria leads most people to eat at their desks rather than with co-workers. - No whiteboards (maybe that's a pro for some people).