Politics, politics, politics - if you're high level, then you'll have to play. If you're low level, then you'll be collateral damage - you do the work, while older out of touch managers fight for credit over emails.
After years of relatively flat corporate structure, the firm is scrambling to build arbitrary titles/hierarchy to "compensate" employees. Newly minted titles include "Managing Director" and we will probably see "Senior VP" soon.
Compensation - low monetary compensation. Speak with most recruiters - they pay below street. Benefits of food and car seem nice, but actually well worse than many other legitimate hedge funds and front office teams at banks. Word has been that higher paid personnel lured to the firm with street/above street level pay get their compensation cut after the first year.
A lot of egos - this is interesting, as the phenomenon exists BOTH within research groups as well as across groups (between different research groups, or between research and ops, or research and portfolio management, etc.) - hard to understand why this occurs when no one is tied to PnL.
Ultimately, most employees are a commoditized cog in a huge asset accumulating/business development focused machine.
