Pros
- There’s some level of stability and potential for salary growth if you know how to “play the game” - They don’t have problems sponsoring your U.K. work visa (which is the ONLY reason why international employees sometimes stick around)
Cons
- It’s a call centre atmosphere with all its bad things, and even when you move to Sales (the promised land for anybody working in Analytics), it will still be. I know Bloomberg may sound cool from the outside in some cities like NY, but believe me, working under call centre rules is dreadful: you need to specify and get approval for every task you do at every single moment of your day, subject to your boss changing it all unexpectedly. You often need to work weekends and bank holidays and you have - You may meet people who like the company and you may see a 4/5 Glassdoor rating is not bad. Well, that’s most likely because Bloomberg is actually a great company to work for, just NOT IN EITHER ANALYTICS OR SALES! Ultimately, whether you like the company or not will depend on what team you end up being part of, who your boss is and which territory/clients you get once you’re in Sales. The problem with that is that you have a very limited say in terms of what teams you want to go to or what product you specialise in. They may try to accommodate for what you want, but ultimately they’ll decide. Unfortunately over half of the people there are awfully bad and inexperienced managers who feel the need of being rude and artificially strict to feel they’re making themselves be respected - The company brags about providing amazing training to make you successful, but in reality you’re not measured for how much you know, but how many tickets with client questions you can close under 30 minutes as compared to your peers. Sure, you may argue that the more you know the easier it will be for you to answer questions correctly and quickly, but in reality there are many bright people who don’t perform as well as others who are bad but play the system to make it look like they’re closing a lot of tickets - it’s now about the good work that you do but about how you market yourself: and you’ll think that’s the case in any job, but Bloomberg takes it to the next level. Not only you have to put up with often angry clients contacting you to demand a quick answer to their problems (rightly so if they pay $30,000 a year for their terminal), but on top of that you’ll have to put up with a lot of managers who praise not necessarily those who do the best work but most of the time those who just sell themselves a lot, and loudly. If you’re into this, go for it and you’ll succeed, but having worked for other bigger and more successful companies, I can say that’s not normal and shouldn’t be taken to that level - being in Sales and/or Analytics, you deal with clients who all have demands for the product to be made better or bugs to be fixed soon. Bloomberg is a company where people in sales or analytics are made feel stupid by engineers/developers. Unfortunately, as the person who has to engage with the client for their every issue, you have no other option than to beg programmers to look at your issues, but you end up having to approach them with so much care because God forbids you dare to ask a question without before spending hours trying to find it buried in page 314 of some 6-year-old case somebody else raised with the same client problem that still hasn’t been fixed - you often have to sell products that are broken, so imagine calling/visiting your client to sell something your boss is telling you to shove down their throats, but they pick up the phone just to tell you (rightly so!) that there are still dozens of bugs that need to be fixed. You end up trying to sell a dessert to the client because your boss wants you to, when actually he hated the starter and the main (but hey, The other options in the market are either non-existent or often also bad or too expensive)