Interesting workplace - Analyst Orbixa Employee Review

I was told all kind of horrible stories about the hostile environment in the company before a new CTO appointment. But everything has changed since then. The place is friendly now, at least amongst developers. We also had been regularly going out together to a pub after work, I really hope this tradition will stay in, it really lacks in big companies. You also get hands on interesting technologies while working on a client/server application. You have a quite big freedom to experiment with the code, learn and try new things with a minimal control. It's also a big problem, because the code lacks consistent quality without explicit design & review process. I believe it's getting better now, because some quality people were hired and they were given freedom to improve things. The SW manager has a great personality, really nice to work with him and learn from him. He possesses an outstanding system view able to resolve the problems even not looking at the code. He is great software architect comprehending various aspects of the system. - Work life balance is good, regular 9-5. - A good location, close to subway. - Massage on site, free lunch (but junk), kitchen with free fruits, tea, coffee. - Friendly colleagues

- Not organized SDLC - Too many meetings, it's overkill. - No feedbacks from the management - No place to grow - Lack of long-term view which will kill the company imo - Mediocre salary, below the industry

- free breakfast, lunch, bi-weekly massage - fellow traders and floor managers are nice

- risk limits too tight for newbies - training is horrendous (my last floor manager just copy & paste the exact same 'training' material from a former floor manager of mine and the strategies are highly outdated and don't work at all) - trading software is absolute crap; anytime there's a volume spike, it freezes/crashes/lags severely - poor payout rate compared to other prop firms - highly questionable ethics in upper management's part --> between december 2011 and march 2012, traders could not trade US equities in our office; reason given was that software was down but heard from other back-office people that something illegal was going on and company got caught in some way and was barred from trading US equities for 3 months or so