Pros
You walk into the office after 9 past the old trading floor shirts framed at the entrance. Maybe they miss the days when they could use hand signals and didn't need to pretend to invest in technology. You leave by 5 sharp and WFH means you lay in bed with Symphony Chat not Teams giving you an occasional nod to change a config.
Cons
Technology is called "IT" internally by the quants and traders. You are treated as a support function. The firm struggles to hire experienced external engineering talent and this is one reason why. The APAC office does not do core development. Most of the work is config changes, support, and parameter updates. This is what "releasing features" actually means. There are too many alignment meetings and too many layers of approval for simple changes. Hard to point to real accomplishments when you move on. At some point something breaks in production. You open Remote Desktop Connection because the automated trading strategies run on a Windows GUI box in the colocation facility. You are now staring at a Windows desktop with a taskbar and icons. You double-click the right ones. This is the disaster recovery procedure for a system moving real capital through real markets. There is no CLI, no API, no automated failover. There is you, a mouse cursor, and a Start menu. You fix it like you're helping your dad find his email and go back to your snack break. Most of the other developers come from banking IT backgrounds, not systems or quant engineering. Compensation is very flat across different ability levels. They recently increased graduate pay without adjusting senior pay, so a new grad now earns roughly the same as someone who has been there for several years or even a decade. People who deliver a lot and people who deliver nothing are paid roughly the same. Good luck motivating anyone. Retention of good people is very poor. People leave quickly once they see the setup.