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: They have been extremely successful over the last few years and experienced rapid growth. Just check publicly available financial statements on the CompaniesHouse website in the UK to see the growth in revenue and number of employees. They are flying a bit below the radar compared to more famous competitors but I would rank them as one of the top quant firms at the moment.

Cons: Growing pains due to expansion, office moves, facilities issues, and other factors have been quite distracting at times, as we are suffering from success.

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.