Pros: - Good compensation - Nice perks (trips, food, etc.) - Good work/life balance

Cons: - unskilled middle management - During the period I have been there, initiative has become increasingly discouraged. - Although advertised as flat, the structure is very hierarchical. - A rush for doing things fast without understanding the outcomes. - A lot of politics.

Pros: Technical problems are challenging and interesting. Colleagues are very smart people, and the atmosphere is culturally rich. Salary and benefits are above the norm.

Cons: Technical management is quite young, and with a notable exception, they all started their career at Optiver. As a consequence, they believe there is no other way to solve technical problems than "the single Optiver way" and cannot even consider that there are different problems which require different solutions. There's a bit of a herd approach in designing systems and applications, and straying from the path is frowned upon even when the advantages of doing so are clear or might be worth a shot. These issues are lately being exacerbated by narrowed diversity in technical recruitment, populating the engineering ranks with clones of the team leads.

Pros: Smart and talented people – everybody wants to solve problems.

Cons: People are very introverted. It's hard to create and maintain social connections.