Citadel Securities reviews

Lack of communication among different teams. A lot of overlapping work. Potentially a lot of time can be wasted. No clear career paths for experienced hires. Experienced hires are grilled for their past knowledge and used to initiate new ideas. Once they feel like they got all the knowledge out of you they will throw you aside. Don’t give up all your great ideas at once or you’ll be useless. Still shares a lot of infra with Citadel LLC, which is a different company so they will not care about your issues if your on the Citadel Securities side. Managers vary extremely, depending on who is your manager, you might have a really bad or great time. Firm as a whole feels very disorganized, things are chaotic until things get real bad and someone finally steps in to fix and reorganize. Everyone only covers for themselves, people are scared to get fired so a lot of finger pointing will happen. A lot of people get fired near December good or bad, can be chaotic. A lot of responsibilities shift on very short notice during those times and it’s definitely not efficient.

Comp growth and upside is lacking compared to other top shops. Compensation grows by a fixed percentage every year rather than a meritocratic model based on performance. There is a very small personal/team performance metric; it is much smaller than any other top shop. The benefit here is that people/teams are hedged on bad years. Large mismatch between compensation for lateral hires versus traders who joined as new grads. Lateral hires are often over-compensated. Home-grown traders comp almost always lags behind even if both people have the same YOE. A lot of inexperienced and incompetent managers who are often hired laterally. Complete bozos running some desks.