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: - Good total compensation, especially for new graduates, if you can get a decent performance review. - Not a lot of meetings. - Five weeks of vacation, and people do take it. - Catered food is pretty good.

Cons: Almost everyone is either a new grad or someone who has been at the company since graduating. The management thinks they have the greatest software ever, but nobody has the perspective to realize how things could be improved. There's a CTO, but I have absolutely no idea what he does since the company has no over-arching goals or architecture. Each office pretty much does their own thing, and the redundancy is insane to me. The comp structure (low base pay with a large but discretionary bonus) favors yes-men who go along with the bidding of their managers, no matter how inefficient or poorly considered their ideas are. Optiver does not ask employees to review their manager's performance. Optiver does everything they can to protect the toxic behavior of people who have been there for years. The default stance of the company is to throw man-hours at a problem before solving it in any way that will make the employee's life better. Research jobs taking too long and constantly failing? No problem, just check the job status at 2 am every night. You want to invest in a more robust system that works without babysitting it? Sounds like you aren't committed. Although the company officially allowed two days per week working from home, the company and Austin office in particular are very hostile to people who actually use it. You are judged for every second you spend outside of your desk seat. They tell hires that they are results-focused and don't care as long as the work gets done, but this is a lie. Optiver is all about presenteeism. God forbid if you should ever get seriously ill while working at Optiver. The management routinely assumes the worst of its employees and ridicules people for focusing on their health. The dev infrastructure is a hot mess that's held together with duct tape, even more so than any startup I've worked at. They constantly reinvent the wheel due to a not-built-here mentality. They have an entire team maintaining research infrastructure, including a custom batch processing system, that is entirely redundant with what's available commercially or through open-source software. It's pretty crazy. The people who get promoted are generally smart but the least-balanced individuals you'll ever meet. They also tend to be spineless yes-men who have no idea how to lead a team effectively. If the team misses goals, it's never the manager's fault; they always blame the employee who put in 70+ hour weeks trying to work within a system that's geared against them. The culture is like a frat house, and the managers in particular are completely immature. There is no diversity at all.

Pros: Good pay, good coworkers, and management.

Cons: Not enough room for growth