D. E. Shaw Reviews in India

Pros

Compensation
Highly informal culture
Parties
Small teams
High responsibility

Cons

Average work quality
Less recognition of work

Pros

1. It gives you a deep understanding of how people work because it is a small company.
2. Easy-access to the higher management.
3. An open culture with a lot of emphasis and respect given to an individual's choices.

Cons

1. Few people will not want to churn out good work and they push good people back. So, it's imperative that you interact a lot with many people and understand how things work across the Firm.

Advice to Senior Management

1. Information flow from top to bottom is necessary to bring out the best in your employees and that's why whenever this has failed to happen, it bring down the motivation of your employees.

Pros

* Work with talented people
* Flexible working hours
* Awesome parties
* Highly employee friendly policies
* Fair treatment

Cons

I personally felt the company needs to improve on communications within the teams.
i.e a central place where what other teams are working on, and if the things they have developed can be used internally in other teams,.

Pros

World class infrastructure with world class Systems team, with organized and disciplined approach to communications and infrastructure management.
Plenty of technical challenges and opportunities around to pick and resolve, only needs 'will' to go and hunt them.
Healthy environment for free exchange of ideas; live and competent people to talk.
A very good pay master. Rewards for excellent performers guaranteed.
Motto: Work hard, Party harder.

Cons

Strong politically motivated environment.
Rewards or recognition could be delayed ( but are guaranteed.)
Company thrives on its hedge fund business performance, so all the technical work can sometimes yield nothing if the business gets a hit. In a way, its a risky environment.
Recruitment is crazy, slow process.

Advice to Senior Management

Cut the slack talk and get to work. Confusing talks sometimes deviate the individuals from their goals and even stagnates their thought process.

Pros

Good Exposure to Finance and domain

Cons

Lack of Technology exposure and development

Advice to Senior Management

Improve your level

Pros

Good Salary for Junior level.
Decent work depending upon your team.
Good work life balance.

Cons

The salary difference between a good performer and bad performer is really huge and there is no justification to a lot of this. Some of them are purely based on Senior Manager's personal interaction, rather than the output.
No goal setting.
No clear view of the project/product.
Lot of recurring and boring work.

Advice to Senior Management

Look down to the skip level and find out more detail, rather than just going by their manager's feedback.

Pros

1. Salary
2. Flexible Work Culture

Cons

1. Lot of politics.
2. Assets going down
3. Not lot of technical challenges.
4. Promotions are based on your relationship with management

Pros

Flexibility in work hours
Best Salary in the industry for the location
Good Culture
Excellent Perks
Good Work Environment
Very good ownership given to employees in their work

Cons

Lack of vision - There doesn't seem to be any vision for various locations
Middle Management - It would be good if higher management can layout vision and purpose for various locations and middle management instills it down to the foot workers

Pros

Salary and bonus
If you have an interest in financial world, its good

Cons

No flexibility of work - No work from home.
Politics.
Bureaucracy.
Only MT/SMT do most of the things.
PM(s)/PL(s) only do prioritization - Do not provide a good vision and do not come up with a plan.
They just want you to slog at the last minute to get job done even if its not worth the effort.
Many people do people management and forget that they are in a tech job.
Freedom to work on something else is not there.
MT/SMT are expected to multitask and slog and do the work end-to-end.

Advice to Senior Management

Just doing prioritization does not help - sketch proper plans. Do not beat around the bush. Talk about tech work. Give time for people to develop good applications.Sort out internal politics.Stop treating specific people as god and give respect to everyone overall. Encourage folks for their good work.Giving lot of money alone does not help.

Pros

- interesting people to work with
- good benefits and facilities
- not very stressful; good work-life balance
- competitive pay

Cons

- people in senior management are smart but are not very good leaders. most of them lack people management skills. there are hardly any leaders one can look up to.

- no uniform work environment. Work-life balance, career progression, fairness in compensation and promotions and other important aspects are solely dependant on the manager of your group. senior management is only concerned with output/results. as long as they are achieved, managers can get away with any attitude.

- career path and growth opportunities are rarely defined.

- need some churn in the middle and senior management so as to bring in fresh perspective and diverse skills . most of the existing ones have been with the firm since a long time.

- don't hire overqualified people for mundane jobs. this seems to be done consciously for some unknown reason.

Advice to Senior Management

- listen to the people on the ground
- have a long term vision instead of reacting to current circumstances
- put in place scalable and sustainable processes