Special Sits (Oaktree SSG, GSO, KKR Special Sits, TPG Sixth Street Partner)

It’s also important to consider the strengths and weaknesses of your personality / work style. MF credit arms will behave more like banking/PE where you work in deal teams, iterative processes, and driving towards pushing out a collective work product. Personalities tend to be much more conformist, clean cut, vanilla professionals that are competent enough but nothing special.

Independent HFs have much less structure, although this is obviously a broad generalization. Much more likely that you will have people that are somewhat of misfits socially, weird, and have hard edges. These people are generally terrible managers, but MIGHT be good investors. But the whole point is to think differently from the crowd (or at least think u do) and come up with complex ideas (sometimes to the detriment of performance in favor of individual ego. good investments are often simple). You are likely to be given a Bloomberg, some subscriptions/research services and left alone to do your work and figure shit out. This can be isolating or liberating, depending on your personality.

Neither types of culture are superior - there are money makers and blow ups in both types, and exceptions to these archetypes. But getting stuck in a culture that doesn’t fit your style will most likely make you miserable and unsuccessful and vice versa.