Pros: Good company. Meritocracy (and less bureaucracy).

Cons: Quality of work is poor. Free lunch is so-so.

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: A ton of challenging problems along the entire stack--you are not pigeonholed. Daily production code releases pushing out new features. Hard work is rewarded very well.

Cons: Not ideal if you are looking for an easy 9-5 software job. This firm will push your limits.