Bloomberg reviews

Let me start by saying my time at Bloomberg did not start off as bad as it eventually got. Once you start off as a "financial analytics" representative they provide you with training which makes you feel like you're learning a lot about finance. In reality they are only teaching you how to use the Bloomberg terminal which is an outdated piece of software from the 80s with an offensive user interface. The name "financial analytics" representative really stands for customer service representative. You work at the help desk. Your entire day is answering tons customer service "tickets" that come into the help desk. There is nothing analytical or financial about this position. When a financial professional comes into the help desk Its your job to search the terminal (most of the time literally searching in the search bar) to find whatever number or news story they are looking for. All you do for 8/9 hours a day is answer help desk questions for clients who 90% of the time are rude and in a hurry for the answer because they value their time much more than yours. Here is where the "toxic" work culture comes from. Every morning that you log in you have a dashboard of your 10+ metrics which are constantly being compared to your coworkers. if your numbers are even percentage lower than your "peer average" prepare to be constantly reminded by your managers to get your customer satisfaction numbers up. Coworkers check each others dashboards to make sure their metrics are better to avoid being in the bottom 10%. Management takes that bottom 10% and will put them on a performance plan and even threaten to terminate their employment. Management uses manipulative tactics to make sure their employees are solving as many "tickets" as humanly possible, like you are a robot. I understand a job can be stressful, I understand that as an employee you are required to perform for the company. But I have never seen a company where people come in and leave with a constant feeling of anxiety that they need to out perform their peers and stretch themselves to a limit to hit metrics. This is not a sales, finance, or analytical job. This is a over the top and extremely stressful customer service job.

- Management culture is cult-like, holding loyalty, blood and sweat over real talent and wisdom - Power struggles at the highest levels of the company (most importantly between the CEO and the head of product) tend to have a bigger role in business decisions than actual business - At least a dozen "lifers", who would be utterly unemployable anywhere else, but are worshiped for blood spilled over projects past, hang around in cushy on-the-job retirement positions, billing the company anywhere from $400K-$1.2M annually for jobs that are generally manufactured and pointless ("head of regional businesses", "chief PVF officer") - Core technology stack is so massive and yet painfully old that attempting to modernize it is an asymptotic goal. The great technical genius behind Bloomberg 2, what was supposed to be the future of the company (but will never actually ship), was a plan to move to the latest generation of Windows foundation libraries. Windows in 2012! Recruiting and PR will tell you that Bloomberg is using anything that sounds new and cool and all up in that web stuff. Somewhere, someone is doing that, yes. You won't. If you work in R&D, and if you want to succeed and earn the trust and respect of your peers, you will work on C, maybe some C++, and you will at least see Fortran if not change it. And it won't be good C code. It will be the kind of C code that reads "int one = 2;", written by unskilled recent college graduates that were mentored by managers with history majors. - Uncle Mike's money spigot runs so fast and hard that managers on the product side are rarely held accountable for failures. With 85% of your revenue coming from a single, huge product sold on a flat price model, how do you measure success? The answer always ends up being some bogus metrics, which the good managers will figure out how to juke and/or just magically explain away while proposing next year's bigger, even more expensive plan, that will not only correct the mistakes of last year's plan but also introduce MORE, GLORIOUS MISTAKES. - Severe violation of personal space, this culture has decided that your acceptance is conditional upon their complete and total ownership of your being. Even the most minute discrepancies in your schedule must be reported (publicly) and explained away; all work is logged and diced into spreadsheets put under constant scrutiny; all tickets (and there are zillions of them) go through piles and piles of approvals and re-routing; transparency is taken to an extreme that is disrespectful and psychologically abusive at times.