In the past Flow Traders has really been a hidden gem, however things and management changed. Now it is difficult finding the proper words to describe how wretched the situation currently is. I will just leave some pointers: - Despite of being a FinTech company, the management sees Flow Traders as a pure financial/trading firm that for some unknown reasons still has other departments other than trading and the management board itself. From the management perspective there is the most huge lack of understanding and interest you can imagine about what technology is/does/can do. Everything that is not trading or management board is a cost that should be cut as soon as possible. - Below market standards compensation. They will talk a lot about bonuses, what it is not mentioned is the bonus of a single year may and will be paid across several years in the future (4yrs). If you leave, you lose the money. Even if you do not leave, for senior positions, the combination of base salary + bonus does not reach the level of the basic salary of most of other companies (that do not have nasty non compete clauses), so the more you stay the more you lose. - Bonuses are driven by mood, lobbying or personal grudges. As an engineer you are going to be evaluated on how good you are in trading. Skillset, experience and know how count literally nothing. Surprisingly enough even traders complain about this unless you are part of the Dutch-only inner circle - Below standard technology level and catastrophic code base. As mentioned, since it is a cost, it's not worth investing in technology or in tech-skilled employees. As long as it is cheap, everything is fine. Since everything is evaluated on how much money it produces in the short term, forget things such as refactoring a decade old codebase or moving infrastructure and practices towards modern standards. Furthermore, when things fail because you are prevented from fixing them proactively, this is used as an excuse for a even lower bonus - Badly toxic culture. Even Bloomberg took interest in this topic recently. What they do not know yet is that the more bully you are, the more career chances you get. - Very demotivated environment in all areas: most of the best sr employees and managers are leaving and so does/attempt to do everyone as soon as they understand how things "work". You can expect regular meetings where the management reminds you how replaceable you are because the true value is in traders or how worthless you are with your 10+ yrs of experience because you do not remember the financial stats for the day. Almost no one know how things/systems work internally and no one cares anymore because everyone is just focused on leaving - Lack of training. You can request trainings using the training budget, but they never get approved if the management thinks that the performance of the team is not good enough - A lot of propaganda and brainwash smuggled as transparency. - The company is sinking (just ignore for a second the propaganda speeches and give a look to the published financial summaries) If you are: - in desperate need to run away from your current job - in desperate need to find a job - looking for an easy way to enter the financial industry You should consider joining Flow Traders, but for all the other cases, you have been warned
