Citadel Reviews

Cons

-Very high expectations all the time which can be too intense for some

Cons

The team size is huge but yet they can't get anything done.

Cons

There is a degree of us vs them attitude both internally and externally. A willingness to have a helpful attitude while present is overshadowed with many instances of not caring for other party.

Cons

The management in technology is a joke. The Directors/Vice Presidents have been there to long and several don't know how tech works. The CTO is always changing so there is no stability. The tech stack is very old. There is also a lot of back stabbing with various teams.

There is no work life balance. You are expected to work a minimum of 50 hours.

Cons

Very cutthroat. Be prepared to work 3 to 4 years here before being asked to leave, unless you are exceptional.

Cons

There are two key problems with working in any BO/MO position at Citadel:

1. You have no future within the company doing anything besides what you are doing now. HR and your manager(s) may pretend like there will be opportunities, but that will never happen and you can look at the people at the firm for proof. Nobody transitions into anything desirable. Advancements are in title only. There are people that have been there for 10 years and are 'managers' and even directors that are doing the same menial work that interns will do. There is zero chance for professional growth or career development. The leadership is entrenched (if you would even want their jobs) and not leaving anytime soon. Stay far away if you are ambitious because, despite the name and compensation, it is very much a dead end for your career. Your only hope for meaningful career advancement is to leave for another firm after 3-5 years (which is all Citadel is trying to get out of you).

2. You are compensated more because you are expected to work dramatically more hours than comparable positions anywhere else. On an hourly basis, you are paid the same as people anywhere else, often even less. It is common to work >12hr days in a MO or BO role at Citadel and not uncommon to see people putting in 14 hour days and working weekends. This happens because there is consistent understaffing and a lack of respect for life outside of work. The claim from management is that you need to 'leverage technology,' which is mostly unsubstantiated rhetoric. Many things cannot (currently) be automated. This would be tolerable if there was any future for people willing to put in such work, but there is not.

Cons

could do a better job

Cons

Poor management. Rampant blame culture.

Cons

No work life balance (you would work 10-11 hours a day min), constant jokes from peers (and management) of "do or be fired". Interests are very short term. Failure is not an option. CYA culture everywhere. Zero planning. No transparency from above. Very poor communication when people come and go. One day you are sitting next to someone, next day he is gone. No notice, no nothing - just like that.

Cons

- The worst siloing I've ever seen at a company. There are multiple bug tracking tools, code repository systems, wikis, and even chat/communication tools and it varies from department to department and team to team who uses what. This makes collaboration nearly impossible.
- Very difficult to make an impact on the tech since it's so spread out.
- You could end up on a very silo'd team with very little access to anything and your boss expects you to work all the time (including nights and weekends).
- Lots of teams want to just buy solutions and build their own spaghetti systems instead of leveraging what's already been built elsewhere (within Citadel and from the open source community). Sometimes this isn't even really their fault - they just don't know what's out there.
- Some of the code you'll find is comically bad because of deadlines, "not invented here" syndrome, and simply asking quants and traders to build software. This goes for use and abuse of databases and queuing technologies as well.
- Very little service-oriented architecture. Lots of monoliths. Poor understanding of basic software engineering concepts like fault tolerance, re-trying i/o, exception handling, etc.