Pros: Citadel is packed with extremely talented, extremely driven, and ambitious people. For all that intensity, people are generally personable and good human beings. A lot will be demanded of you, and nearly everything you do will have a clear and immediate impact on your teammates, if not the firm. Work is intensely collaborative. Even on your worst day, you will feel tremendously accomplished. If you like pressure, you will be constantly stretching and growing. The hype is that Citadel is the place to work with the best and be the best, and the reality lives up to it.

Cons: Being the best and being surrounded by the best can be exhausting. Discussions are impassioned, heated, and sometimes combative. It’s great that everyone is so engaged, but nothing is ever easy. Management is very top-down. I’ve never had a job where so much time and energy was expended reporting to and justifying plans and decisions to the various layers of management above, or managing their curiosities and apprehensions. Leadership changes are frequent, and each time a lot of effort goes into bringing the new management up to speed. It seems sometimes that each day brings a new “top” priority.

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

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

Pros: Pay and benefits were great. Free meals, but no cafeteria. They want you to work at your desk so you'll work longer hours. And so you'll stay in your little cubbyhole where you belong and not interact with anybody who "doesn't need to know" (a key buzzword at this paranoid firm).

Cons: The manager was horrendously insecure and micromanaged everything in a field he had no business or experience to justify doing so. HR and the manager's boss didn't seem to care that he was doing this, even after informing them he bought an expensive board without consulting his subordinates. It was effectively useless for what he wanted to do with it, something that could have been avoided if this guy had put his ego aside and asked the people working for him with more experience and knowledge. The company has a highly secretive culture. At least two people were hired into our group without my knowledge. Granted, I wasn't a manager myself, but I'm generally accustomed to being permitted to interview candidates I'm going to work with and at least make a recommendation. You're also not allowed to talk to anyone because of this whole "need to know" BS that permeates the whole place. If you're coming from the tech sector and are used to being allowed to talk to people in other groups to get an idea of what it is they want, forget about doing that here. The insecure micromanager is your gatekeeper here. He will dictate the specifications and how he wants you to build your design. He will not care about your feedback or warnings about his architecture because his ego is too big. Then, two weeks after you make your delivery and move on to the next project, the micromanager will tell you that the requirements weren't defined right and you need to go back to the old project and fix it so the internal customers will be happy. This is something that clearly could be avoided by just letting us interact directly with the internal customers rather than carry this whole "need to know" concept to the paranoid extreme that exists at Citadel. I'll say two more things that sum up the company culture here. About six months through my one-year stint at this place, there was a company-wide meeting where a friend of CEO Ken Griffin gave a talk about something. Following the presentation, there was a reception afterward. It dawned on me that I knew nobody there beyond my manager and colleagues at this reception. And if you held a gun to my head today and told me to name more than six or seven people who work for Citadel (never mind titles or departments or anything), I'd end up with a hole in my head. Just stay away. This place is just not worth the trouble or the pay, or dealing with the micromanager's ego.