Pros: Beautiful office. Pantry, corporate perks, and a summer party. Work is rewarding and not too overwhelming. The experience here is well recognized and valuable for future employment.

Cons: Very outdated technology! There is code still written in C and FORTRAN. The MSG is terrible, and you are forced to use it every day, sending/losing emails. Politics! Although, to be fair, the amount of politics is very reasonable for a company this size. BAs hissing down your neck, and you do have to work overtime sometimes.

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: Some of the newer teams are working on really cool stuff. If you get into one of these teams, you will have lots of fun. The culture is laid back; no one cares if you walk in at 11 am, unlike some of the older teams where the manager will take you aside and lecture you if you come in at 9:35 instead of 9:30. Don't join the older teams. You'll work on the same thing for your entire time, sometimes not even pushing any code to production for months on end, ending up in the project being cancelled. Some of these notorious teams are: * Any of the "yellow key" groups such as Equities and Mortgages * Some of the real-time teams such as BPIPE, Ticker Plant, Data License The cool teams are Software Infrastructure and some foundational application teams.

Cons: Lots of cliques, particularly in the older teams. Avoid the older teams.