Citadel

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

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.

Get some real engineering people in charge, instead of vipers from Goldman.