AKUNA CAPITAL Reviews

Pros

Great company with excellent management and great growth prospects!

Cons

Going through some growing pains as the company transitions from a small start-up to a medium sized company

Pros

Decent compensation, benefits, and perks. You'll gain lots of experience diagnosing and fixing system crashes: firefighting.

Cons

High turnover firm with no respect for maintainers with a bug-ridden system. The bug backlog is hundreds of JIRA tickets long! Fixing bugs to keep the system stable was not a priority here, you have applications crashing at least once per hour. Those who did fix bugs either had zero recognition, or worse were blamed for them, even though they didn't introduce them in the first place. It's a great place to be if you want to learn how to deal with immense pressure, guilt-tripping, and firefighting.

Pros

If you're a recent graduate, you might learn things, mostly via anti-patterns.

Cons

Upper management is the cast from Confederacy of Dunces, expect irrationality, poor or no planning, general panic and theft of your ideas. You'd think that the dev, it, quant, etc... management would get together and form a cohesive plan for the future. They barely talk. I've wasted months of work on projects that were mothballed halfway through implmentation because of some management oopsie. It somehow got worse in 2022, which led to my self-inflicted exit. Akuna keeps an unprofitable Sydney office, because the owner moved there and wants to pretend that he still does work. Sydney office is staffed by friends, family, and other non-performers. Company hires more and more junior devs, but provides little mentorship or project oversight by seniors (what seniors? they're too expensive, so just get more juniors). This leads to most projects to be completed in laughably suboptimal ways. Way Akuna is going, its next CTO will be Donald Duck/Trump.

Pros

In office baristas are fantastic, office amenities and views.

Cons

Compensation is not in line with overall hours and expectations. Massive disconnect between management and junior level staff. Training and development of staff is not prioritised. Your experience is dependent upon your direct manager and team. There are some genuinely TERRIBLE managers who can ruin an otherwise good experience.

Pros

Many of the developers/engineers and traders are very talented. There is an outward appearance of a work life balance and minimal stress as compared to other firms

Cons

I do not trust the leadership in this firm. There is a constant turnover of talent, a constant drive to recruit junior talent/interns/new grads with minimal or no experience, and no focus on a mentorship model, nor appreciation for what the senior talent brings to the table with their lessons learned, networks to tap into, and knowledge others can learn from. A January layoff removed people that were attempting to course correct bad past software decisions, were strong engineers, and provided mentorship. The same folks laid off were then used as scapegoats to the remaining teams as to why performance was not at expectations. Firms layoff people all of the time. This layoff cycle seemed not only cold, but when combined with offers being rescinded leaving developers without employment sometimes days before their start dates, I question the ethics of the leadership and HR. My faith in the firm’s direction has been completely lost. Understanding the way layoffs were conducted, I believe HR and senior leadership has little/no understanding nor respect for developers. By looking at previous comments, know that the abundance of comments that talk about the firm being so young and fresh is true...but that comes at a cost. You will not get the opportunity to learn and you will be thrown into bad architectures to support. Some of the few and more senior folks in leadership positions are the cause of some of the bad architectures and performance unfortunately, but they are well versed at playing the political game. Teams on average have 3-4 years experience, inclusive of some of the c-suite in Chicago that have very little experience/no experience outside of the firm.

Pros

Coworkers were very friendly Lots of team knowledge Lots of outside work events Many in-office amenities

Cons

Too many egos Poor management Lack of clear direction for staff No team-to-team communication Procedures based on tribal knowledge and word of mouth Senior management only cares about making money Focus is only on traders and not support staff

Pros

In no particular weighted order: - Intelligent Coworkers - Good Office and Location - Hybrid Working Arrangement - Straightforward hiring process

Cons

In no particular weighted order: - No clear/set/structured on-boarding (not really a con, but more of a challenge, as this is not too uncommon for smaller places) - Was hired to introduce and provide an alternative/updated method of development only to experience that the very first stakeholder didn't want to adapt or test any new ways of operating. Resistance as a whole was not unexpected, but what was unexpected was that this person was one of the interviewers for the role - Was given x date as a deadline for initial work, but was brought into a meeting, with HR present, 1.5 months before the deadline to talk about lack of "output" and given my papers

Pros

The work can be very interesting

Cons

Comp is on the lower side

Pros

People, culture, and atmosphere overall

Cons

too many screens. You kinda get tired after 8 screens every day

Pros

Still attracts decent talent. Some very talented colleagues.

Cons

The company has no guidance starting at the top. Has been on the decline for a while. High rates of turnover especially for junior positions