Citadel Software Developer reviews

3.7

49% would recommend to a friend

(104 total reviews)
avatar

Ken Griffin

69% approve of CEO

62% positive business outlook

Software Developer employees have rated Citadel with 3.7 out of 5 stars, based on 104 company reviews on Glassdoor. This indicates that most Software Developer professionals have a good working experience there. Citadel is rated in line with the average (within 1 standard deviation) by Software Developer professionals compared to other employers within the Financial Services industry (3.7 stars).

Reviews by job title

104 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.

5.0
Sep 3, 2016
Recommend
CEO approval
Business Outlook

Pros

Everything is deployed really quickly, so there's a quick turnaround time on projects. There is potential to make a big impact if you can take on the work.

Cons

Some technologies used are outdated, and because there is such a quick turnaround time on projects, sometimes employees can use that as an excuse to write subpar code.

Viewing 97 - 99 of 104 Reviews

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