Pros: The company has great WLB. There are good benefits. The work is interesting.

Cons: Tech is not the best.

Pros: Nice office, smart people around, free lunch, very good line for CV. After SQ I started easily passing screenings to other hedge funds/tradings.

Cons: Management massively and openly favors people of the one particular country and very particular universities from this country. It's so obvious that everybody is joking about this fact including people from this favorable group. For a dev side the "rule of thumb" is not to apply for a "Software engeneering" positions. They are very legacy based and overall devs are considered to be a second class citizens. Although there are also dev teams with a quant dev/researcher titles which do purely software engineering and have a very nice tcs and treated well.

Pros: Cooperative & Open culture, even between investment desks. On the startup <-> bank culture scale it's very close to the startup end: low bureaucracy, emphasis on delivery. Senior management are accessible and approachable. Not too big that you end up only focused on a very niche tech/area (like FAANG), but big enough that you still get to see challenging problems. Technology is valued and not seen as second-class employees compared to investment. Quality of other people you interact with is pretty high.

Cons: The flip side of low bureaucracy is being light on project management. Sometimes getting things done is really about finding the right person to talk to get your request prioritized. While big data sets do exist, most of it is readily tractable just by being a decent dev. Don't come here expecting novel Google-scale work.