Pros: Squarepoint has clearly done very well over the past few years and is consistently growing and expanding as a result. That means a lot of career opportunities, and an environment that's anything but stale. I've noticed a lot of new faces showing up around the office recently, and there's a good positive culture emerging in the engineering teams - casual conversations at lunch, mid-week beers just outside the office on a sunny day, general camaraderie. Colleagues are very skilled. The cynical politics you might sometimes expect at a HF are not present, at least among the software engineering lot. Working here has been fantastic for my career.

Cons: Big growth means growing pains. There's some clear technical debt that needs paying down across some of the firm's systems, which becomes more obvious as scale increases. Not everyone's experience is the same. For better or for worse, different teams can have quite different management styles. Expectations are high. People who struggle can be left feeling exposed; despite the growth, there's clearly a culture of not accepting mediocrity.

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: Inter-teams communication is promoted making it easy to work on projects and clarify requirements.

Cons: Since the firm is global, that facilitated communication can be hindered by timezones.