Pros
This review is for software engineers, specifically those coming right out of university. - Party culture. Everyone touts a "fun, startup-like" culture these days and it typically means that there's one ping pong table in the break room that you wont ever be able to use without looking like a slacker. Belvedere actually has the culture that other companies pretend they do. Constant open bar events, unlimited keg access, a lavish 20 year anniversary trip to Ibiza, sponsored intramural athletics (don't worry you get to drink at those as well), the whole nine yards. It's not uncommon to see people grabbing their first brewski at 1:30pm on Friday on their way to the dept-wide tech meeting. If you're extra busy that day you and your boys will start pouring up no later than market close at 3:00pm. The culture is the non-material compensation that makes up for the shortcomings of the job. I've heard the company described as "fratty" and a "boys drinking club". That's certainly an exaggeration but I would consider those to be positive adjectives anyways. - Fun coworkers. There's a lot of fun young people to work with. I think that Belvedere does a great job with behavioral interviews to filter out people who would ruin your work experience. Everybody is very nice and there are a lot of social events for you to get to know them. - Workload. Most weeks you will get in at 9:00 and be out by 5:00. I know many other fintech jobs have much greater demands but at Belvedere most people work a 9 to 5 most of the time. - Prestige. Belvedere won't pay ya the big bucks but Belvedere looks good on your resume when applying to companies that will pay market value. Belvedere is a great stepping stone if you want to work anywhere else in the fintech space.
Cons
- Developers are second class citizens. I was once told by a trader that developers cost the company money and traders make the company money. It's not often that it's said to your face in such terms, but everybody knows that devs aren't the top dawgs. - Relatively poor compensation. Management doesn't say it with words that devs are second class citizens, they say it with numbers. The mantra at Belvedere is that you'll be making the big bucks "later". It's very cheap for management to pay people in "laters" but if you talk to people who have been at Belvedere for a while you'll realize that "later" never came for them, and it never will for you. The expected salary progression put forth by recruiters isn't even close to the reality. Don't be surprised if you and everyone else in your class is at or below the lower end of the "expected" 1, 2, and 3 year marks for compensation that will be dangled in front of your face. Compare this to any Tier 2 market makers (IMC, DRW, Optiver, etc.) or big tech companies (Facebook, Amazon, Google, etc.) on levels.fyi and you'll see that Belvedere pays new devs about half as much. To any active employees: don't be afraid to add more data points to levels.fyi, transparency will help any non-partner. - The actual work sucks. The culture needs to be this fun to keep anyone willing to put up with the work when they pay you so little. Financial software is horribly boring to write. To understand the work you're doing you would need trading experience so the work has no context, the end users are ungrateful, and the support systems are scant. Systems are constantly breaking, your "product expert" will frequently misconfigure settings and take up your time asking you how to do their job, and you will constantly be chatted about urgent issues that are actively costing the company money. Any of your mistakes that make it into prod will be assigned a dollar value for how much you cost the company, but you will never get a number for how much profit your excellent skills generated for the company. Don't forget: it's the traders that made that money, and the devs who cost them money. New features are deployed at night, so your chat will be blowing up during dinner every time a new problem is discovered, which is often. - Turnover. 30% of employees in the tech dept that were employed on Jan 1st 2020 no longer work at Belvedere. I would estimate about half of those were voluntary departures. Recruiters tout that Belvedere has a median stay of 4.5 years, but after only 20 months less than half of the 2019 class of university hires are still employed. Belvedere is quick to let devs go, and refuses to pay market rates for the high performers, so they leave to get what they're worth at other companies. Belvedere's insurance policy against the mass departure is that they don't teach you any marketable skills. All you learn at Belvedere is how to deal with the idiosyncrasies of the undocumented, cruft-laden software that management will never allocate any resources for because they're always going to staff the greenfield project that might not ever even make it to production - Horrible product management. Don't be surprised if you spend weeks working on a feature and after you finish it you're told that the traders were never certain that they wanted it in the first place. Product is supposed to be the bridge between tech and trading, but they don't know jack about either so they only make things worse. I'm convinced they keep scheduling endless meetings so that they seem busy and they aren't all fired for taking money and actively slowing down the software development process. - Vindictive non compete. Should, heaven forbid, you be fired, Belvedere will forbid you from working from other trading firms (where you're most qualified) for a long time and offer you no pay to do so. The non-compete has been described as "the rawest deal outside of Philadelphia" by a veteran of the industry. The non compete is quite unusual and harsh for new hires, but I've heard through the grapevine that it isn't as bad as it appears if you give Saul a call.