Pros
Free cookies, okay healthcare, all the sugary soda you can drink.
Cons
If Disneyworld is the happiest place earth, then Bloomberg LP must be the most miserable. Imagine employee turnover like a poorly run fast food restaurant. Picture management that is virtually unemployable elsewhere, but oozes of unrequited arrogance. This is the hell that is Bloomberg LP. If you read the positive reviews most of them are from people who have worked there less than three years and the big pros include free snacks. Yes, the biggest pro of your job is free Oreos? I can empathize with these people though, as the pay is so low for many positions, the employees cannot afford their own Oreos. Bloomberg does love the Bloomberg lifer. While the people with brains, talent and ambition all walk out the door within 2-5 years, there is a group that has reached their peak with their first job after college. Bloomberg is a very flat culture, meaning that no one is viewed as particularly skilled and the employees are interchangeable and replaceable. I sat in countless meetings hearing managers drone on about how they did not know anything about what they were doing and proceed to waste untold dollars while driving the product or project into the ditch. When you are lifer and the member of the chosen group you are not held to competence. There is a long-standing rumor that there is a list of 100 employees who are targeted as having a future at the company. The rest? Good luck. Heaven forbid you are over 50, you will either be shown the door or tortured until you leave. Most all of the management is pulled from the group of lifers, so with the talented people leaving the company, this leaves those who can’t leave ,If you work there currently, look at the managers, and team leaders, particularly in sales. While there are a few exceptions, most of them are emotionally disturbed, sycophantic or openly displaying neurotic behavior. It looks like the Island of Misfit Toys. Most of the team leaders and sales managers could be replaced by a spreadsheet and a quality CRM system. Many of the managers cannot operate the internal CRM, so you may have to spend 20 minutes documenting a 10-minute call. It can take weeks for the managers to actually determine what “sale” is actually, and if it is convenient for them, they well deem it a “low quality” sale, so it won’t count towards one of their many quotas. With this comes the arrogance. There are team leaders and managers who seem to view themselves as equals to traders or bankers or whatever. Most of them are too cowardly to buy anything beyond a target date mutual fund in their 401k. One of the few benefits of this place is that you do make great contacts across many industries, so if you can’t extricate yourself from this place, it should be very clear about how little ability you really possess. There is a paranoia from the top down that customers and employees are some how stealing from the company. I, Me and Mine are the pronouns of management and some of them believe the own every hour of your life. This goes along with the Bloomberg myth/lie that it is an “entrepreneurial” environment. Nothing could further from the truth, the post office is likely more entrepreneurial. What the management calls ‘entrepreneurial’ is actually stealing sales, ideas or whatever for their own, and not rewarding the people who actually did the work. If they spent as much time actually doing work of some value as opposed to trying to take credit or discredit people they don’t like, you might actually have an operation that lives up to its braggadocio. There is no real leadership at Bloomberg anymore, what is left are politically motivated, neurotic misfits plodding though to make sure their fiefdoms survive or more likely looking to leapfrog to the next fiefdom before it is found out that their current fiefdom has been run into the ground. The constant turnover of people who have been there less than five years makes the covering up easier and makes it look like they do not have a problem…figures don’t lie, but liars sure can figure. Bloomberg survives because of the communication tools , this how debt gets traded and the lack of a uniform alternative has kept the ship afloat, as most everything else has been less than successful. If this is ever disrupted, the sycophantic management, long since lost of any new ideas, will be caught flat footed. The actual Bloomberg office in New York is a bit of a mess. The office has that “we are so cool in 1999” feel, however rife with shortcomings. Including a lack of restrooms (it is not uncommon to wait 20 minutes in que to use a restroom) crowded choke points, a lack of meeting space, no privacy whatsoever. It gives the experience of being in Penn station at rush hour. Pre-covid, being in the office was not much better than being at Penn station. If a “co-worker” is not known to you, expect to be treated like you were walking through that esteemed train station. I once saw one employee knock another employee (an older female) down on the escalator and not even stop or apologize. They hand out soup at lunch time in carts around the pantry, but the employee became so unruly that they had to deploy a queuing system. I did see an employee take a swing at another employee to get to the soup faster. A swing at co-wroker for a cup of lousy tasting soup that might be worth 50 cents. That really says what employees think of their jobs and their co-workers. Expect to hear an unending stream of shopworn business buzzwords, use of the word “leverage” in every sentence “I leveraged my car to go the Jersey Shore this weekend” for example. This is what passes for intelligence. You will quickly learn to ignore everything that is said for fear of becoming inoculated with the Kool-Aid. If you work there now, you know this is the cold, real, truth. If you do not see this, then the Kool-Aid has taken hold, and you are part of the cult. If you have been offered a job there, yes, it is better than homelessness. Keep in mind you are not going to work for a nimble, fire in the belly tech firm. You are not going to work for a top end media company that will do world changing reporting. You are not going to work for an investment bank that will do commerce that moves the world. Have an exit plan ready at all times. You are going to work for company that will ignore its customers any time it can, change the rules to serve its management’s needs, and lie to anyone and at any time to serve its perceived needs. You are going to work for company that exists only to serve its founder’s unending ego. You are going to work for a place that expects you to give your life to the dear leader, and in return, will pay you as little as they can get away with. You will never be a shareholder or experience anything here to build real personal wealth. You will soon realize the operation is built around a transient work force, and that you are meant to be disposable. You will soon realize that you are working in the modern version of something that is more befitting Upton Sinclair’s The Jungle, than a true tech giant like Apple, Microsoft, Google or LinkedIn.