Pros
1. It's more like a high-tech company rather than a financial industry company. 2. The company is filled with brilliant people. 3. Generous compensations and good benefits. Cash bonus, and employee investment opportunities etc. 4. Good learning opportunities for technologies. Lots of company infrastructures are open to everyone. Just need to worry if you have enough time to learn. 5. Lots of daily office perks. Company parties are usually held in very prestige locations. 6 work / life balance is decent. In normal cases, do not need to work long hours for core teams. 7 many offices in the world. Good experience to visit offices in different countries.
Cons
1. very brutal competitions between trading teams. Trading teams trade similar products and use similar technologies. Talking between teams needs to very careful. 2. generally boring but demanding daily tasks. For a period of time, you will feel every thing is new. After a while, it's easy to get bored about daily tasks. To improve competition, it's involved with shaving off a few CPU instructions in the fast path or improving the prediction accuracies by a few percent. 3. less opportunities for newcomers. The firm had a very good foundation of software infrastructures. It left very little room to improve. so new projects are more related to bug fixes or tiny features improvements. 4. waste of top talents. After a few years, besides the bank accounts, those top talents spent their life in pretty meaningless optimizations or tiny works. No real impacts are generated to the external world. In the long run, these feelings will come back and make you doubt about your work even life. 5. The firm favors new graduates from top universities too much. They only held campus interviews in five or six ivy league or top tech universities. Sometimes, it will make regular joes uncomfortable working with so many top school talents.