Bloomberg reviews

4.0

79% would recommend to a friend

(8,227 total reviews)
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Michael R. Bloomberg and Vlad Kliatchko

85% approve of CEO

73% positive business outlook

Bloomberg has an employee rating of 4.0 out of 5 stars, based on 8,227 company reviews on Glassdoor which indicates that most employees have a good working experience there. The Bloomberg employee rating is in line with the average (within 1 standard deviation) for employers within the Informationstechnologie industry (3.9 stars).

Reviews by job title

8K reviews
1.0
Apr 8, 2019
Recommend
CEO approval
Business Outlook

Pros

- Generous health insurance - Usually not much OT (if you are in the right team) - Friendly coworkers - Harmonic culture means no one would scold you even if you constantly perform so poorly - Flexible work arrangement (work from home, late shift etc.) - Free drinks and snacks, and sometimes free lunch provided in luncheon meeting or sharing session - Relatively higher pay than the competitors, if you only consider yourself as data entry and customer service job...

Cons

For the candidates taking interviews or considering the offer of Market Data Analyst or other Global Data related position, I suggest you making up your mind of what you expect to gain from this job. First off, let's begin with daily work. As an analyst in Global Data, it is inevitable for you to take up some manual data entry or maintenance works and the volume depends on which team you will be assigned. For example corporate actions team is well known for it notoriously huge amount of daily work such as resolving helpdesk tickets, clearing workitems from the queue in processing tool etc. Fundamental or Estimate teams will involve less helpdesk ticket resolving but more on value tagging (or correction of value tagging by vendors) from company financial or broker researches. Now for every new hire, they will be labelled as "level 1" for the first 2 years of tenure with the performance metrics focusing on daily operations productivity. After staying for 2 years you will progress into "level 2" with more metrics on projects you lead or initiate. You should have a psychological preparation about the discrepancy between what has been advertised in job description and the actual daily operations. As a rule of thumb, please pay attention to the first few points listed in the job duty section in a job advertisement because usually they account for the majority of you daily tasks. In terms of "interesting" projects leveraging your data analysis and programming skills, well.. you can see them among the bottom of job duty section and so you should know what I mean. Of course if you satisfy with data entry and maintenance experience learnt from this position, I think it is a great job for you referring to my Pros above. However if you aim at sharpening your data analysis skills and developing programming expertise through some data science projects, think twice... In fact, the mismatch of expectation explained above is one of the major reasons why there has been such a high turnover rate in this department, and even more devastating during 2018. Global Data did hire some strong candidates with sound Python/R expertise and data management background. But as the previous reviews said, due to numerous roadblocks including but not limited to: clumsy internal procedures to request access to database or even the installation of latest library; predefined preference (or limitation) of platform where you have to code/develop such as BQL/BQNT/DTP etc, such strong candidates are destined to leave soon out of frustration, disappointment and boredom. Another group of attrition focuses on those who equipped with 3+ years of market knowledge and product specific experience. Internally we refer to "Subject Matter Expert" aka SME. Without these SME who excel at asset classes they cover to co-lead the data analysis, auto news generation or process efficiency projects, the quality of final deliverable could be hideous and sometimes is utterly a joke to our client's eyes. A news article citing the valuation of insurance sector health based on P/E ration could be published, unchecked, unchallenged by the analysts, due to the fact that if there is a SME ever he or she will correct your logic to use P/B since it is kind of a well known industry practice if you ask any client from equity research covering insurance sector! Do not expect you team leader would have more market knowledge nor tech skills than you or any analyst to give you some useful advice, simply thanks to the unique management culture in Bloomberg. While Data emphasizes so much on engaging tech stack, very few, if not none, of the team leaders knows how to code in Python or other languages. Be prepared for yourself to be constantly asked by your team leader during bi-weekly catchup with one FAQ: Is there any project you want to do? I bet you a facepalm if you are conscious enough to ask this yourself: Isn't it supposed to be the TL who should possess in-depth product knowledge and insight to help initiate project ideas and assign to analysts according to their different skill sets, rather than ask analysts to contribute ideas simply because the TL has none? If you read through the long article and arrive at here, I truly appreciate your effort invested in researching this company or global data. All things considered, if you do not mind of steep learning curve and value your learning opportunity and exposure to the true big data analysis and data science, go somewhere else because I am sure there are many great companies out there with a team full of supportive, competent and visionary seniors and managers who truly know what data science is. If you only look for a fresh graduate job with a beat-the-market starting salary, I wholeheartedly suggest you think about your exit strategy starting from as soon as your onboard date. We have long lost the job stability with a clear observation last year about the layoff of a bunch of news reporters and even managers who worked for more than 12-15 years, just before the 10Bln long term bonus payout in this March.

2.0
Oct 29, 2018
Recommend
CEO approval
Business Outlook

Pros

- Great pay - Great benefits (no-fee health insurance, access to nyc & london museums for free) - 3 month new hire training program is a good opportunity to make some friends

Cons

Everything at bloomberg is legacy. Code runs directly on hardware on machines in the datafarms. Some servers are IBM and solaris, not linux, and don’t even support the c++ compilers from 2011. Most senior devs have been in the company since college and haven’t learned anything new about the world of coding for years. It is tough when your team lead is both a friendly person but also hasn’t heard of basic coding tools, like `curl`. I have friends who entered the company with me just a year or so ago out of college and spend most of their time writing fortran. (If you don’t know what fortran is, and you’re under 40, that’s probably a good thing.) Bloomberg Terminal frontend apps are written in an esoteric javascript framework called Rapid, which is a major headache and won’t help you build skills in any modern frontend framework. Bloomberg is a good first job out of college in that you get a great pay and great benefits and can use that to establish yourself in a new city (probably nyc) and save up some money / pay off loans. But if you care about growing as a developer, and if you will be unhappy in an organization where people aren’t passionate and there are few opportunities to really learn, leave quickly.

3.0
Oct 1, 2018
Recommend
CEO approval
Business Outlook

Pros

I will try to be as honest as possible - some of the pros are this is a really good place to start your career, especially if you want to make the jump to one of the big banks in a year or 2. Really good benefits as well - good base, free food, insurance fully covered and probably the best 401k match you will find out there(7.5%). New batch of kids out of college every few months start and all of global data is all young kids who end up becoming your good friends since there is nothing to do in the area. You can your time here to try to build up your tech skills or study for the CFA. Take the offer if you have contacts already in Global data that can honestly tell you about the team that the company want to place you in - it's a complete hit or miss and you want to make sure you don't get stuck for 18 months on a useless team wasting your time.

Cons

I mentioned they bring in a fresh batch of kids in every few months - There's a reason for that. The turnover is incredibly high and the reasons for these have been stated lengthily in the other reviews. Probably about 75% of the data teams are complete BS. Most of your job will be manually tagging data day in and day out cranking out work items. Then you will be assigned a block of time where you have to do troubleshooting for clients and their questions. Nobody can escape this, everyone who is an analyst has to do this. It can be manageable if you are on a big team where you might be assigned to do this once a week for a few hours to doing it multiple hours a day. The actual "data analysis" works probably comprises of a small part of your day unless you are an extremely motivated individual who stays in the office for an extra 10 hours a week to do these projects on your own. It is crucial that you find contacts within global data that can give you an honest picture of the data team that you get the offer for. There are some very good teams that are working on exciting projects under talented managers and if you get onto those teams then this should be an auto accept. One of the other things is that it is an unfortunate cycle where the talented folks quickly learn that they either got stiffed by a bad team/manager, or reached a professional/educational growth ceiling in their role. Since the management structure is extremely flat, these folks leave within 1-3 years. Because of this, the middle of the road analysts stay and end up becoming horrible managers. There are of course some amazing managers, but this is the exception not the rule.

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