Pros: Slowly moving towards open source, and standardizing best practices.

Cons: A flat hierarchy, where everyone becomes senior after 3 years, means that career advancement varies greatly across teams. Similarly, this puts too much power in the hands of managers and upper management. If you're unlucky, you'll be working under a manager who micromanages and overworks employees just to get a chance at promotion.

Pros: If you like finance, this is really a good place to go.

Cons: Some legacy code is hard to understand.

Pros: Excellent benefits Access to in-depth financial news

Cons: Note: I have many years of software engineering experience, but this was my first job in the financial industry. So the "cons" I listed here may be "norms" for other people who have been in the industry for a long time. 1. You will probably feel more like an assembly line worker than a professional with special skills. Don't expect to have that feeling of a respected, unique engineer. 2. Sometimes laughable software practices. You will know what I mean if you can tell the difference between programming and software engineering. 3. Need to fix a lot of nonsense code and very often need to work within the constraints of broken/bad architectures. 4. Must use the Bloomberg terminal for almost everything, which makes me feel the clock has been turned back to the 80's. 5. Unprofessional/incompetent managers/team leaders. I would say many of them are more like foremen than managers. I suspect they don't feel very secure (because their Bloomberg "management experience" probably will be useless if they need to find another job), which makes their management even worse. 6. Many people need to work long hours. 7. Not enough bathrooms. 5 out of 10 times you will need to wait in line to get a stall.