Collegial environment for career development
Pros
Cubist is extremely selective in it's recruiting. The vast bulk of hires are lateral, with a handful of PhDs and masters students hired each year. The quality of colleagues is extremely high, and people honestly try hard to be collaborative and help one another. Employees' experiences can vary greatly across different PM teams and support functions: Each PM team is free to be entrepreneurial, and each team pursues a different set of strategies with a different management approach based on the interests and expertise of the PM and members of the team. Support functions have different skillsets and cultures: for example, the talent team doesn't code, the data team tends to hire relatively less experienced people and train them up from scratch (eventually many of them move on to join PM teams). Management is focused on the career path of the individual. While some PM teams do not meet the firm's bar for performance, the firm always seems to take steps to provide opportunities for a better fit internally, and it seems like in the vast majority of such cases people opt to take internal opportunities. The firm provides a "target rich" environment for research, with a vast archive of datasources, ideas, and other resources. As a major client of most sell-side firms, Point 72 and Cubist have access to all the resources that the street can offer.
Cons
The average PM team is small in headcount. While this means that each person on the team can have high impact, it also means that sometimes teams cannot pursue resource-intensive highly speculative projects. People generally agree that the culture of Cubist is pretty distinct from the rest of Point72, which is not a surprise as Cubist employees tend to lean towards PhDs in Computer Science and Statistics, wheras the rest of the firm is populated disproportionately by MBAs. There are quantitative functions on the discretionary side of the firm, but they are limited and in many cases fairly secretive. Cubist offers most staff a lot of autonomy, but it's hard work. Senior executives are "always on" and by extension many teams expect high intensity work and output from their colleagues. It is fairly rare for a researcher on a team to subsequently spin out and become a PM. This is understandably discouraged, since the PM teams want to have some comfort that their IP lies within the team.