Pros: People are really smart and hard-working.

Cons: Nothing I can think of.

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: Great compensation Smart coworkers Meritocracy If you want to make money, come here.

Cons: Not for everybody. The work gets hard sometimes.