Bloomberg reviews

- Career Opportunities. Now this depends on individuals' goals, but from coming from a small company in the financial industry, I've found that opportunities here are very limited. After you've worked in the industry for some time, projects complete, and they turn into maintenance mode (aka "keeping the lights on") in the company. This is very necessary evil since once functions complete, support needs to remain for the function, but this lowers the amount of meaningful work that can be done. Those that want to change things up will generally be pointed towards the direction of management. - Challenges. This expands on the above point. Unfortunately, the amount of challenges in this company are very limited. The problems can be difficult, but with the wrong reasons. This includes challenges from compliance, poor design, and complex internal architecture. There's significantly less "fun" challenges in the work compared to a startup or smaller shop. This can lead to some days that feel terribly long due to working on mind-numbing tasks. All companies will have these tasks, but Bloomberg seems to have a lot more do to their extensive use of proprietary tools. - Legacy technologies. Bloomberg is involved with "modern" technologies like Hadoop/HBase and Redis, but a very large portion of the foundation software is still C++98 (with a Bloomberg Standard Library to cover some of the C++11 features), but the technology lags behind significantly due to all the dependencies in the software.

1. Extreme favoritism - this will be a dead end job for you unless management likes you. You can play the game and kiss-up to your leaders but make sure the career path is worth it first. 2. Role progression is not tangible for everyone. The goal post changes every season. You’ll get to Sales when they want you to go to Sales. If they don’t want you to go, management will make sure of it despite your efforts. 3. Prejudice. I was in the department for two years. People of color don’t receive promotions that often and they’re some of the hardest working in the department. I mean it. Worked alongside many of them and they were great. Pray your direct leaders are neutral, goal-oriented people and not biased power trippers. 4. Micromanagement. It’s disgusting. You pretty much have to document every reason you’re not engaging with a client. Yes, management checks this. Doesn’t matter if you’re overwhelmed, pick up the phone and call because now you have a new metric that tracks how many people you call per hour. Oh, doesn’t matter if you have a bunch of angry traders cursing you out. Skip that person and move along! Leadership will watch the little things like how often you’re on “hold” or see what time you badged in if you’re over a minute late. Just nonsense to make you uncomfortable. Seen, heard and experienced.