Although Bloomberg is a business that is solely owned by Michael Bloomberg, after Bloomberg left to become mayor of New York and entrusting the business to his partners and senior level executives, the management ran the company much like a publicly owned company which made it lose much of its charisma, luster, and appeal. Prior to that, Bloomberg was very, well..."Bloomberg centric", with a lot of internal propaganda boasting the sheer genius of the CEO and president, complete with posters and books all over the office, much like what you would see in a stereo typical documentary of a communist country. I personally didn't mind this so much, because the alternative was even more annoying. Michael Bloomberg propaganda was replaced with sales propaganda and the entire office was forced to become very sales-centric, which for many departments outside of sales didn't make too much sense.
It is said that a career in Bloomberg is a "Bloomberg Career". To clarify, what this means is that regardless of your previous experience, goals, skill set, etc, after you are hired, you can be moved into any department within Bloomberg at any time. For example, you could be hired as a sales manager, but after a year, management may move you into Tech Support or into the Call Center as a call center operator, regardless of whether you can or want to do the job. Although this is an extreme example of what could happen, it has happened before. Hence, in many cases management does not care too much about your career nor take in consideration that this may not be a good move for you, but rather is focused on what they think is right.
Bonuses are fair (most of the time) but is highly dependent on sales performance. The bonuses are paid in the form of certificates or more commonly known as "certs". Certs are given to you at the time of employment, and can fluctuate in value over the course of the year depending on the company's sales performance. The good thing about this system is that you'll get a good idea how much your bonus will be. But the bad part is that unless you're a sales manager with the ability to make senior level decisions on sales initiatives, there is no way you can increase or control the value of your certs. All you can do is work hard and hope that your manager rewards you with more certs at your annual performance review, which will be paid the following year.
Base pay rarely changes (at least for me it didn't). And based on talks with my colleagues, that seems to be consistent everywhere. However, employees were rewarded (sometimes generously) with certs. Some senior employees could have several hundred certs valued at anywhere from $300 to $1000+ per cert, depending on the sales performance for that year. Furthermore, there seemed to be no apparent caps on the number of certs an employee is allowed to have. So if you consistently get additional certs every year, your bonus can be considerably more than your base salary. The biggest disadvantage is that even if you're not sales person, the bulk of your salary relies solely on performance of another individual or department. Moreover, there are no guarantees that you'll be able to keep your certs. A "new" manager who's trying to make budgetary cuts, can easily take them all away, which leaves very little incentive to work harder, or even stay with the company at all.
