Citadel reviews

4.0

70% would recommend to a friend

(763 total reviews)
avatar

Ken Griffin

84% approve of CEO

80% positive business outlook

Citadel has an employee rating of 4.0 out of 5 stars, based on 763 company reviews on Glassdoor which indicates that most employees have a good working experience there. The Citadel employee rating is in line with the average (within 1 standard deviation) for employers within the Financial Services industry (3.7 stars).

Reviews by job title

763 reviews
2.0
Mar 15, 2017

Citadel Securities

Recommend
CEO approval
Business Outlook

Pros

Comp is very good. Free food is decent.

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.

3.0
Feb 23, 2017
Recommend
CEO approval
Business Outlook

Pros

- Passionate employees who know their respective fields very well and work hard. - Great compensation. - Getting specific tech or tools to use isn't a problem (money-wise, anyway) Still, this depends on the team you're on. - If you have a good boss (and boss's boss), you'll probably have a great experience. - The challenges at the scale Citadel operates at are uniquely interesting and they have some awesome solutions to some of these challenges. - Great office, food, gym, perks like that. - Generally good hiring culture (depending again on team).

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.

1.0
Feb 3, 2016

Software Developer

Recommend
CEO approval
Business Outlook

Pros

Decent pay, free lunch. I got a 50% raise when I joined the firm, which was pretty nice. The catered free lunch was just ok, but hey it was free.

Cons

Bad culture. Be prepared to be yelled at by traders if anything remotely related to your responsibilities went wrong. If you accomplished something, however, no one will come congratulate you, because performing well is "expected". My manager constantly sent out work-related mails at 3 am, and we were constantly working overtime past 8 pm. Work-life balance was out of the window.

Viewing 10 - 12 of 763 Reviews

Glassdoor has 983 Citadel reviews submitted anonymously by Citadel employees. Read employee reviews and ratings on Glassdoor to decide if Citadel is right for you.