Bloomberg reviews

The biggest downside is that the company is divorced from Silicon Valley and its ways, making it hard for former Bloomberg employees to return to greener pastures. The projects are effectively managed by the sales organization, which is eager to please the customers often making impossible promises, rushing projects and asking for shortcuts left and right. As a result, the code is chaotic and archaic, and in bad need of huge rewrites and lots more testing. Some of the projects are ill-conceived from the start; several projects in my team that took months to develop received little or no use from customers, and the salesperson that asked for the feature, having signed up the client, has no interest in pushing your product. Your experience varies significantly depending on who your immediate manager is; it may very as far as the flexibility of your workday - some managers expect you to be at work no later than 9:00 and some others recognize that the flexibility to choose, within reason, what time you come to work in the morning, will affect your output.

The technology is ancient (the majority). A lot of programmers are simply maintaining legacy code (fortran, c) that cannot be retired or converted. The company also uses a TON of proprietary software, all developed in-house. For example, they've created their own Service oriented architecture (ala WSDL), two home-grown databases, entire UI framework, and other things. It's very easy to get "stuck" at bloomberg because you might be using proprietary tools 75-90% of your day! Also, there is an entire lack of structure when it comes to the software development cycle. Projects are handed out with no formal written documentation: let me repeat, NO formal written specs! There is also NO official testing (no qa teams whatsoever!). The programmer is expected to perform the testing of their applications.