Pros: * The food -you get £12 in credits a day to spend on a delivery service. This usually covers lunch. * Nice kitchen * Quarterly paid for events * Conference budget * Generally nice people * Decent working hours * Well located office, above a gym/barbers & very close to a tube station. Supermarkets nearby. * Good health, travel and dental insurance. * Seems to be doing fairly well, almost kept pace with major indices last year.

Cons: * Repetitive work -you will not learn much here. * Low pay for the industry * Hidden company structure means progression is totally obfuscated. No KPIs, no performance reviews, no structured development. If you want to be promoted then you should have joined as the company was growing. * The person making decisions about compensation doesn't know what you're working on. * There is a lack of structure in projects. Direction of work seems to be dictated by what is in vogue at the time. * Flat structure causes politicking. * Median tenure is around 1.5 years, there's a reason for this. * Lack of any diversity, both in people and ideas. * Remote working seems to be available for certain people and not others. At least 4 days in the office is strictly enforced for certain people but not others.

Pros: The pay is competitive.

Cons: - Zero focus on career development or progression - Gerontocracy - senior tech management keeps churning "experienced" and unimaginative middle managers and senior developers while giving no one an opportunity to advance from below - Technology is subordinate to business/research, given menial programming tasks and anything business does not want to do, and treated as serfs to researchers/projects while tech management does nothing - Do not expect any exposure to business or financial concepts - they do not want you to ask questions - Zero communication or cohesion or discussion of organizational objectives, deep siloes and Darwinian project/people management culture - Senior business management is a bunch of quants with zero people skills that can't communicate with other human beings on a basic level, they don't care about employees or even about making money - they are rich already and this is just a game to them

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.