Pros: Good food and large bonuses

Cons: Extremely political. The majority of where you must spend your time to survive at Optiver is politics. If you do not, you will be eaten by others that do. Management has zero interest in dissuading this behavior. Watch your commits, as large pieces of work will be quietly re-based into other developers' names. This is not by accident, as you'll start hearing word back that they're bragging about having written the code. Poor management promotes the worst people to management roles after seeing their own negative traits in them. Management is also gifted to long-term employees who cannot keep up with the technical work anymore. These managers all review each other, ensuring the quality stays low, as poor management has the majority and removes anyone that doesn't have the negative traits they hold up as ideal.

Pros: As a software developer, I have found that everyone is very approachable across all levels in the company. If I ever have a question that needs answering, it's easy to sit down at someone's desk and get the answers I need. From a technical standpoint, I value Optiver's emphasis on starting with a simple solution and incrementally building up from there when needed. Another advantage is that since our customers are our internal traders, we have an immediate feedback loop where we can continually improve and tweak our applications until we have a really solid system. As far as company culture goes, I would say it is relaxed, and I enjoy the optional events and activities provided outside of work.

Cons: Trading is a fast-moving industry, with products and strategies changing. This can put pressure on our applications to change frequently, but also provides new problems to tackle and keeps things interesting.

Pros: I've worked at Optiver a long time. Every year it gets better. * The company is managed on the basis of principles and values, not process or politics. * Those principles and values align very nicely with mine: * Autonomy: there is very little hand-holding and extraordinarily high expectations of individuals in the company. The company rewards those that keep pushing those expectations higher with greater responsibility and authority. * Collaboration: there are a lot of great fights over the right way to approach a given problem. When we're at our best, everyone in the fight has a strong opinion but is also listening to everyone else and continually re-evaluating that opinion as new information, ideas, and opinions are expressed. * Prudence: the company carefully evaluates risk/reward trade-offs both when it comes to trading and technology decisions. The latest fads (cryptocurrency, esoteric programming languages, etc) are carefully evaluated, but reckless pursuit of them is frowned upon. I'll end with a sports analogy. Working at Optiver Chicago is like playing for the Patriots or the San Antonio Spurs. It certainly isn't for everyone. But if you like competing for the championship every year and always pushing yourself to be better, there's no better team to join.

Cons: If the company values do not align with yours, you will find it an increasingly frustrating place to work. Honestly, just read the cons from other posts and you can see how that plays out. If you find the principles above strange, out of fashion, or backwards, you'll agree with other people's cons. If you think those principles are refreshing, you will have a hard time coming up with many cons.