Pros
Great office culture. Employees are friendly and helpful, and even when teams lose money, no one is getting yelled at. Good work life balance and hours. People can usually take a break in the middle of the day to go to the gym or play frisbee, and you can go out for lunch, which isn't something you can say for some finance firms. Free donuts on Mondays and bagels on Fridays, plus free snacks, coffee, tea, fruit. Generally the managers you work with day-to-day are pretty good about managing your time and teaching you. The firm doesn't over-hire, as opposed to other prop shops that might hire 20 people with the intention of firing half or more after 1 year.
Cons
If you're reading this you're probably a college senior doing recruiting. You should know that the firm's core business is pretty niche, and you won't be able to get another job in the same field (electricity trading) due to the non-compete. You also will likely have trouble finding another job in finance (such as hedge funds, banks, or prop shops). The people who work here are of a very high caliber, very intelligent, and many from elite universities such as Ivy Leagues. You might think that people who leave might go to other elite finance firms, but that's not the case, and instead many go to grad school or business school. So the exit opps are terrible for people who want to do finance as a career. Now, if you want to be a lifer -- and the people in more senior positions by and large have been here their entire careers -- then this may be a good fit for you: decent hours, nice metro area, downtown DC is vibrant for young people, and you can eventually move to the suburbs. But it's hard for you to already know that you want to do this for a long time, since you don't even know the nature of the work, and you're probably ambitious. Working here is probably not as good for your career as working at a well-known bank or consulting firm, as silly as prestige is. On the other hand, working here does arm you with better technical skills than the average consulting or banking junior employee, and does give you more challenging problems to work on. Morale is also pretty low. People joke about getting fired. Our budget for fun events was cut, even though the savings are negligible to the firm, and we were basically told that morale wasn't low enough yet, and the rate of people leaving wasn't high enough yet, for them to care about morale. Also, most people are not going to end up being great at electricity trading, figure this out, and leave the firm. The path to promotion and long-term success here has a pretty high bar, and is roughly measured in terms of how much you contribute to profit. Now, this isn't unreasonable for the firm, but it does mean that for some people, you'll reach a ceiling and never make it past that.
