Pros: Very smart co-workers, good vision, and good PnL.

Cons: Overall, a very stressful environment with no job security.

Pros: The comp sets the bar for the entire industry. Free, albeit largely bad, food.

Cons: The vast majority of the "engineering" work at Citadel is low-level maintenance and end-user support. The focus is keeping the lights on, with effectively zero thought given to longer-term projects. The engineers who succeed here are the types who can produce huge amounts of exceedingly mediocre code on short notice. Despite the nature of the work, this is a high-pressure environment. Management talks a big game about investing in technology to scale the business, but ultimately this means turning the screws on lower-level employees, rather than actually building scalable systems. Eventually, systems/groups end up in crisis after one too many patches/hacks. The response to such a crisis is inevitably a kind of Banzai Charge – throw guys at the problem until it has been hacked into submission in the immediate term, then pray it stays working through the next bonus cycle. I can only speak for the engineering side; I assume, given the success of the fund, that other areas are better.

Pros: - Food - Insurance - Facilities - Marketing

Cons: CTO changes every 2 years, and policies/ideas can be bi-polar if you look in the long run. Senior management does not represent the middle-lower food chain to the CEO well. The upper food chain is in its own world, and no one cares to ask about front-line workers. Senior tech leads have pre-conceived notions about the tech stack. Cost/effort estimates are overlooked. The tech stack has massive issues, always in fire-fighting mode. There is no design/tech lead per se, only a namesake. More tactical efforts than strategic are made to get to another day, week, month, and then you get a bonus, rinse and repeat. Literally face a tribunal when issues happen. Forget about work-life balance, including on weekends. Heavily under-resourced across teams. They pay you above the market rate but make you work at least 2X. No learning opportunity. Too much politics.