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: + Little politics + Tech leads still write code + No red tape

Cons: - Can get stressful depending on the team.

Pros: Amazing compensation (perhaps THE best in the country, comparable to USA pay at top-tier firms). Amazing benefits: * Restaurant-quality, freshly made food on site * Barista on site * Annual company trip Very smart people.

Cons: Bullying from management, and the company does nothing about it despite being aware of the numerous problems. Long hours and demands that things get done very fast (sometimes 12+ hours per day). Messy, undocumented legacy code, and nobody in the organization seems to even know the business requirements it solves, so it's nearly impossible to rewrite. Extremely poor code quality (e.g., things checked into code that should be in the database, or at the very least in a config; more layers of abstraction than needed; not adhering to best practices, etc.). Very poor culture. Colleagues are obsessed with money. Seriously, all they talk about is work and money. Yes, I like money too, but there's more to life than money. You effectively can't trade the stock market with personal funds as long as you're an employee due to huge restrictions they place on you being able to trade with personal funds.