AQR Capital Management Reviews

Pros

- Some smart talent working here - Less competitive than some firms - Good name on resume (might change soon though) - Some interesting Quanta lectures

Cons

- "Fake quantitative firm!" Has a bunch of Econ/Finance people running a "quant firm" instead of having more quantitative people, and they often don't know what they are doing. - Commute wastes so much time for employees. We get that you want to pay less taxes but at the expense of making a large proportion of your employees commute and waste time. - Nepotistic hiring and marketing specifically to the alma maters of the Principals - Terrible tech (clusters often break with just 1 TB of data). The response is to blame the researchers for this rather than increase the capacity of the cluster or switch to AWS - Tech hiring standards are lower than that of FAANG (rarely true at a top tier hedge fund) - A lot of kissing up to upper management including incompetent upper management, which is quite common. People will stay until their manager leaves "to save face," and that deincentivizes working hard and efficiently. - Compensation is far worse than that of traditional competitors - Stubborn about their traditional ways and refuses to innovate - AUM has dropped over 30% since I worked there - Poor data (wastes serious time)

Pros

- Benefits and pay are very generous, hard to beat - One of the most respected names in finance - Close interaction with senior mgmt, some teams have excellent mgmt - Free breakfast, lunch, dinner, cell phone and gym reimbursement, other perks

Cons

- Many demoralizing teams and managers, lots of internal politics, not a surprise there is an extremely high turnover rate - Culture has suffered heavily in recent years - Internal systems are outdated, though improving - Lack of work-life balance depending on team - Roles aren't initially made clear to many, leads to higher turnover and other problems, make sure you know what you're signing up for

Pros

Good perks (minus location), great name on resume. Extremely talented, intelligent, and ambitious younger colleagues--AQR tends to hire the cream of the crop from undergraduate / masters degrees. People are chill and usually very friendly. You will learn a lot if this is your first job in Finance.

Cons

AQR is a glorified Fidelity that hires over qualified "researchers" to perform mindless tasks. Although it depends on the team, most researchers are given very little incentive to actually make the funds better--this is in large part due to the massive egos of many of the researchers. Serious research is immediately dismissed as "data-mined." The only valid research is published research, which by the time of publication, is already arbitraged by faster firms. The day to day instead involves data checking, approvals, etc. It's extremely disappointing. Don't take the job description seriously. This pivot has been driven by greedy principals who quickly learned that they could rent seek off of a brand name.

Pros

Where should I start: - You will have a chance to master Python and Data Cleansing, under the pretense of portfolio management and research - If you work in HR you will master the art of leaving fake reviews online on how 'great' this place is (sadly, this has been happening the past few months) - You will enjoy super low-quality breakfasts, and a $10-capped lunch per day so you will appreciate eating 'healthy' elsewhere - The brand name brings some heft to your resume, although perhaps not for too long given that people are starting to see the real colors shine through - If you are desperate for sponsorship (H1B or Greencard) they will do that for you, at the expense of offering you a salary way below the market average

Cons

This firm would make a great subject for a white paper on how to: - Run your business to ground by wasting time on 'Tweeter' picking fight with investors, vendors, etc - Ignore (encouraging?!) juvenile highschool-level politics across your firm and successfully kill the moral of low and mid-level employees, creating a revolving door - Not pay attention to the basics of organizational structure, shuffle employees around with no clear logic, and add or eliminate positions for absolutely no reason - Boil the ocean and reinvent the wheel hence waste money because you know it all, and know it better than anyone else - Promote people only if you personally like them, or they come from certain schools, or they openly praise you and the 'outstanding' job you are doing I would not bother leaving a review but I could no longer ignore how the non-sophisticated investors AND junior job seekers are being mislead to belileve AQR is a great successful money manager. This is all propaganda: AQR is a sinking ship.