Much worse than it used to be - Data Engineer Chicago Trading Company Employee Review

Used to be good but significantly worse in the past two years with failed ambition. Business wise Ctc hired more than 200 employees which is 40% more with the expansion monetary policy of the government with the attempt to get a hand into hedge fund, futures trading and alternative business but only voloverlay team seemed to work out but later they found out that their internal model didn’t account for event volatility somehow so that team actually just exploited other internal omm team for a bit time, very few of new team actually event trades in the market so they fabricated reasons and fired 50 people and insulted these people by telling rest they are bad, but the next day they changed their one pager from ambitious “be global powerhouse of prop trading in 5 year” to “we do what we do best”. And refused to tell how much % is the pnl target for first half year as they used to as always, They tried to compete with other cowboys out there by offering huge money to interns and qta but let some of them go in 2 weeks because some CS intern don’t even know how to use git, silly interview process. Their outdated trading system is suffering to keep up with modern high freq trading business, some desk still even use excel for trading and take seconds for each valuation circle, given a lot of new comers with crazy technology to speed the game up, they also realized this but struggling to do anything about it, because a lot of those tech managers are really outdated, some of them don’t even code for his whole career, and don’t even know what is schema normalization and would convert a KB file to MB just to fit in a single huge crazy table, but he doesn’t care it’s company dollars. Hired some good engineers but super hard to make best use of them. Some manager will keep firing good people just because they had a second thought on how to approach project and claim they are just not able to keep up the speed hence only junior people get to stay to do inferior engineering. Watch out folks more layoff will come