Citadel reviews

Like most hedge funds, the org chart is very flat. You will be rewarded through comp, but if you desire more than money, the upward mobility is pretty limited. For many years, there was a saying that Citadel is a "technology firm that happens to trade". This is ridiculous. The technology at Citadel is very outdated and many teams spend an equal amount of time working around the limitations of the infrastructure as they do building solutions to problems for the business they serve. Of course the darling businesses are allowed to buy whatever they need to get the job done, but for the other slow-but-steady money makers, technology can be extremely frustrating. This frustration transcends both the software (compilers, tool kits, etc.) and the hardware (storage subsystems, network infrastructure, etc.). Unless you have deferred comp (difficult to achieve) or are directly involved in a business (QR and trading), your comp is based on the overall performance of the firm and yourself,. but you have no direct way to participate in the gains (or losses) of the firm. A voluntary employee fund (or something along those lines) would be nice for those of us that are dedicated to the firm and want greater benefit from our contributions.\ The office is sterile. There is very little access to natural light (unless you happen to have an office), otherwise it's a fluorescent hell. The "open cubicle" concept is extremely detrimental to productivity, but I'm not sure it was done in the name of conformance and collaboration. In reality, it does nothing to foster collaboration outside of what a team is going to do naturally, with the added strikes of being noisy and disruptive. The politics in upper IT management can be paralyzing. We often do nothing out of fear or a Congressional-like inability to compromise, rather than stepping on some toes and doing what's needed to get the job done.

-People who haven't been able to take a vacation without working a huge amount in over a decade because management could not care less about employees' quality of life -Back office IT professionals worked to complete burn out levels and with no apparent interest in staffing up -Same issues above lead to rampant illness - have seen people working with everything from pneumonia to severe injuries because there is no concern for people to be healthy -People getting transferred, slow tracked, and fired after taking time off for medical or personal reasons -Lack of resources in IT and general reliance on third parties leads to horrible data quality issues that are barely being contained by even the most diligent employee. Mistakes everywhere, and if it's big enough, instead of trying to fix the actual problem management will just fire someone so they can save their own butt and say "it's been taken care of." I've seen so many great people get fired -The way they fire people - it may be necessary to some extent for security reasons - but it's pretty horrible. Immediate firing and escorted out - HR comes and slams stuff in boxes with no respect for the items - family photos mangled and likely needed possessions sitting for weeks before being returned to employees. -All hours (middle of night on weekend) phone calls/people screamed at for minor issues -No tolerance for stuff that is pretty normal in other modern offices, like working from home occasionally or leaving a tad early to catch a train - I guess the VPN is only there so that they can make you work on vacation -For all of the above, pay is not that much better than other comparable employers and benefits (especially to include families) are actually a lot worse than many other similar companies -You will most certainly not get promoted in back office functions without putting in a huge number of years (10+), and even then it's not likely