Pros: I met some nice people, who were genuinely friendly, until I resigned. Free breakfast and lunch, with healthy and delicious food. The food was the main highlight.

Cons: Managers are very bad and don't have people skills. There's no work-life balance. They fire people often and without remorse. The culture is often toxic.

Pros: Really friendly and smart people. The food is fantastic.

Cons: Extremely high standards. I understand that trading firms always want to attract extremely smart people. However, the standard settings here are not for hard-working smart people, they are for intelligent smart people (geniuses). In other words, to meet those requirements, long working hours and always pushing oneself every day are inevitable. Peer review for the bonus. It will be taken as a waste of time if you ask others for help, and colleagues will give help. Since the project assigned to each one is "autonomy," employees here won't be evaluated by how much they help others, but only by the outcome of their own project, which is not helpful to the growth of technical skills in the long term. Cultural fit. There is hardly anyone asking about your weekend plans, let alone your life plans. People working here only care about working efficiency and how much they can earn every year, etc. What's more, people here are quite ego-driven with their "prestige," which makes me feel uncomfortable sometimes.

Pros: 1. Amazing history of developing systems and solving problems. You touch and own a lot of projects that were really creative and tell a story. 2. Interesting work and its diversity, from being close to research and trading to being a full systems developer. 3. Amazing people and a lack of documentation makes you keep talking to them a lot and learning from them directly. 4. Great pay, perks like free food, great office outings, etc.

Cons: 1. Possibly longer work hours 2. Some lock-in to Optiver specific technology and setup