Pros: Snacks, free food, and human hours with a 1-hour lunch break. Underrated qualities: The staff is very professional but also very human. This is a large fintech company, yet it moves efficiently like a startup. You're also given a lot of opportunities to donate and contribute to your local community.

Cons: You're kind of thrown in to learn as you go, which is scary, but that's how they do things.

Pros: Job stability - you won't get laid off unless you are completely incompetent, and even then you might not get laid off.

Cons: Mediocre talent pool. Tons of bureaucracy and politics. Poor management/leadership. Little to no career growth unless you are a "Kool-Aid drinker."

Pros: Good benefit. High impact in the financial market. Good gateway from CS to fin-tech & hedge fund. If you have a pure CS or engineering background and a great interest in finance, this is the right place to work. With a few years of experience here, you can have access to almost all types of financial/quant/hedge fund developer roles. Good training classes for new grad students. Good immigration policy for non-US employees.

Cons: Not a good place if you are a tech person. This is a place where argument wins over code. Good interpersonal skills are much more important than your code quality. As a developer, you will feel you are always second-tier in the company and have little control over the product, but must follow business and sales. Few of the upper management have a tech background, so they do not know much about how to improve the efficiency of developers by improving the overall software infrastructure. Most of the developers work hard and are generally smart, but the overall productivity is quite low. One example is that we "reinvent the wheel" a lot. For instance, for almost every team that uses Python, they write their own Python utility module. Let's say there are 100 teams that use Python, and there could be 100 different versions of a `parseTimeInput` method in their own Git repositories. I have no idea why the whole company does not maintain only one general Python library that all teams can use. In this place, it is very hard to get rewarded or promoted by just doing a great job in coding. Communication and other interpersonal skills weigh more than tech skills. That is why there are more upper-level managers with business and non-tech backgrounds in the development departments.