Citadel

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.

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.

Commit to doing fewer things better; pursue smaller deliverables on a faster cycle with a tighter feedback loop. The communication overhead of managing so many concurrent projects with so many stakeholders (who take some work to bring into alignment) is often inefficient or ineffective.

That said, the culture and way of doing business seems to be effective for attracting top talent and getting the most out of them.

It’s not comfortable, but neither is, I imagine, a Formula 1 race car or a rocket trip to Mars.