Pros: Open discussion is generally encouraged; you have the freedom to pursue work on what you feel is beneficial. There's lots of variety with what you can do. Free food, coffee, typical perks. If you have no issue playing politics and working 60+ hr weeks, you can survive and maybe even get to 100 marbles in 4 years (it used to be faster). But you have to be willing to play the game and know how to strategically throw others under the bus so that you can survive calibration. I say this purely objectively and without prejudice; it's necessary to survive the environment that leadership has created.

Cons: The company used to be meritocratic, in that you were allowed to "eat what you kill". If you found ways to improve trading performance or delivered ways to make money for the firm, the rate of advancement was wide open. This is no longer true and seems to have been replaced with an arbitrary system of politics. In some cases, I have observed leads straight griefing their reports just to take credit and survive their own calibrations. It's very Amazon, and it's directly hurting trade desk profitability and effectiveness. Because of this, comp is not distributed evenly or per effort/contribution. This has led to a major exodus of talent over the past few quarters. Even long-time company vets are fed up and fleeing to other firms. On some teams, the median tenure is probably under 1 year. At the time I left, there were several red flags, including random firings regardless of performance or effectiveness, with dangerously low morale. Since the start of the year, I've witnessed a steady outflow of talent. Traditionally, Optiver has been known for a collaborative and transparent culture. This is still true but diminishing rapidly. Things are slowly becoming incredibly siloed, and to survive the incredibly volatile calibration periods, it's better for you to keep your head down and not try to stick out too much. (I have known a few people to be fired simply because they were threatening their manager's position). Suffice to say, all of this has created an incredibly brittle and undocumented tech stack that runs off of vibes as opposed to any engineering rigor. Stuff breaks frequently and often, which requires most devs to spend late nights and weekends hacking up solutions last minute following bad deployments. Extended hours are often expected, and while no one will explicitly say it, failing to respond on vacation or outside of working hours will reflect negatively on your cal.

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

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

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.