Optiver Reviews

Pros

I've worked at Optiver a long time. Every year it gets better. - The company is managed on the basis of principles and values, not process or politics. - Those principles and values align very nicely with mine: -- Autonomy: there is very little hand-holding and extraordinarily high expectations of individuals in the company. The company rewards those that keep pushing those expectations higher with greater responsibility...

Cons

If the company values do not align with yours, you will find it an increasingly frustrating place to work. Honestly, just read the cons from other posts and you can see how that plays out. If you find the principles above strange, out of fashion, or backwards, you'll agree with other people's cons. If you think those principles are refreshing, you will have a hard time coming up with many cons.

Advice to Management

Keep preaching principles, keep ensuring the best people are happy, keep pushing us to ever higher standards, and don't worry about the noise from people who should be playing for a different team anyway.

Pros

I worked at their Chicago location. Decent starting salary Office was alright

Cons

A lot of their senior software engineers are incompetent. Additionally, internal organization is a mess. A lot of tasks get bounced around between teams because there is no one source of structure.

Advice to Management

Fire the engineers who review the HackerRanks

Pros

Great culture, smart and friendly co-workers, competitive salary

Cons

Cannot think of any

Pros

Great collaborative culture and friendly colleagues. Optiver is the best market maker on many markets.

Cons

Being on certain teams means easier to get a good review.

Advice to Management

Try to give roughly same ratings across teams.

Pros

Good job for new grad, decent starting salary and opportunity to learn.

Cons

Growth ceiling after first couple years and bad management.

Pros

Fantastic perks. Brilliant coworkers, smartest group of people I've ever been around. Bonuses have been great in recent years. Work can be quite interesting and there is no red tape in between you and getting your ideas out there and implemented if they show promise. I've seen new employees hit the ground running and make significant contributions quickly. Great trader training program. If you are very...

Cons

Lots of pressure to always be on top of your game. They will not hesitate to cut you if you can't keep up with management's standards. A sizable portion of your compensation is determined by your individual performance, where the standards of judgement can be unclear. Management, who is responsible for this, clearly plays favorites (usually the top performers, but not necessarily). They are also very unforgiving when...

Pros

Transit reimbursement, paid health / dental, weekly massages, in-office barista, catered breakfast and lunch

Cons

Long hours are expected, management doesn't allow for mistakes, there is a lot of pressure

Advice to Management

Stop setting your employees up for failure. Have more frequent performance reviews, as well as clearly defined goals. HR should also be involved more if an employee is not living up to company standards.

Pros

pretty good worklife balance

Cons

no need to mention cons