Senior talent fleeing, comp targets shrinking, WLB and culture rapidly in decline, losing people left and right
Pros
Open discussion is generally encouraged, you have the freedom to pursue work on what you feel is beneficial. There's lots of variety with what you can do. Free food, coffee, typical perks If you have no issue playing politics and working 60+ hr weeks you can survive and maybe even get to 100 marbles in 4 years (it used to be faster). But you have to be willing to play the game, and know how to strategically throw others under the bus so that you can survive calibration. I say this purely objectively and without prejudice, it's necessary to survive the environment that leadership has created.
Cons
The company used to be meritocratic, in that you were allowed to "eat what you kill". If you found ways to improve trading performance, or delivered ways to make money for the firm the rate of advancement was wide open. This is no longer true, and seems to have been replaced with an arbitrary system of politics. In some cases I have observed leads straight griefing their reports just to take credit and survive their own calibrations. It's very Amazon, and it's directly hurting trade desk profitability and effectiveness. Because of this, comp is not distributed evenly or per effort/contribution. This has led to a major exodus of talent over the past few quarters, even long time company vets are fed up and fleeing to other firms...on some teams the median tenure is probably under 1 year. At the time I left there were several red flags including random firings regardless of performance or effectiveness, with dangerously low morale. Since the start of the year I've witnessed a steady outflow of talent. Traditionally optiver has been known for a collaborative and transparent culture. This is still true, but diminishing rapidly. Things are slowly becoming incredibly siloed, and to survive the incredibly volatile calibration periods it's better for you to keep your head down and not try to stick out too much (I have known a few people to be fired simply because they were threatening their manager's position) Suffice to say, all of this has created an incredibly brittle and undocumented tech stack that runs off of vibes as opposed to any engineering rigor. Stuff breaks frequently and often, which requires most devs to spend late nights and weekends hacking up solutions last minute following bad deployments. Extended hours are often expected, and while no one will explicitly say it failing to respond on vacation or outside of working hours will reflect negatively on your cal.
