Bloomberg L.P. Reviews

Pros

Really professional and amazing culture. Also my team is multicultural and we have great relations. A really nice place to work in London city.

Cons

The most important downside for my is the working hours. They are not really flexible with them. But also the same happens in the most companies.

Pros

Great Benefits Package
Smart and stimulating colleagues
Opportunity to learn about the world of finance.
Regular working hours after you have been here for a while(more or less)
Pay is good in good years. At the first sign of a lean market the incentive pay is disproportionately reduced.
Great place to stay if you have kids and need an easy job to coast through or are waiting to collect social security.

Cons

Technologically in the stone age - hence once you are here for a while it is very hard to get another tech job outside as your skills deteriorate.
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Absolutely no opportunities for growth. Management does not really care about growth of their employees - they just provide lip service with all the latest initiatives as they have to tackle the alarming attrition rate.

Senior management is very old school and does not know how to run a 21st century knowledge shop. It is a very 1980's mafia style work culture. Loyalty and appearance of loyalty is prized above everything else. New York Times called it a 'digital white-collar sweatshop'.

There is no thought given to software processes - it is a single minded focus to get stuff out to clients as fast as possible without regards to quality. As a result the product is a hotchpotch mix of applications which no one understands how to use. In their rush to get products out they have made some really bad software decisions which they have then spent man-decades correcting.

Advice to Senior Management

Umm, right like they will listen.

Pros

The benefit used to be good. Now it is OK. It is good to work there for a couple of years and move on. Don't stay there too long.

Cons

The people who got promoted in the recent years are not very good people. Technically they are not strong and personality wide they are either zero or negative.

Pros

Snacks, location, colleagues, benefits, vacation time

Cons

Decreasing value year-over-year to my career. Developer management cares only about themselves and not their employees (saw this in several groups). Company is overrun by suits trying to run software groups with too much influence on week-minded software developer managers. Heavy use of Fortran and proprietary tech. Spend more than a few years at this company and you will not be employable elsewhere.

Advice to Senior Management

Hire outside developer managers

Pros

Good work life balance, good benefits.

Cons

Promotions are based on favortism and not based on who has the most product knowledge and is suited to grow the product and lead a team. They pay new hires more than employees who have been there for 3-5 years. Do not reward hard work in terms of compensation. Outsources many jobs overseas.

Advice to Senior Management

Work closer with employees who actually work daily with the product and know what clients are looking for.

Pros

Pantry
Networking with several cultures
Philantropy and projects
Open 24/7
Beatiful Offices

Cons

Salary
Lack-of respect
Prejudice
Repetitive jobs
Culture
Working hours

Advice to Senior Management

Communication, Communication and Communication
Don't think that people believe in poor arguments to make them work harder

Pros

-Lot's of perks (free food and drinks)
-Salary was good
-People are friendly
-Office is state of the art and very beautiful
-opportunities to do interesting projects and travel (for some positions)
-good opportunity to learn about the financial market
-opportunities to explore other career tracks within the company (if interested)
-Very diverse group of employees

Cons

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.

Advice to Senior Management

-Stop trying to grab so much attention and manage your departments more effectively
-invest more in the employees, and less bribes with food and office decor

Pros

1. Great compensation package, especially for the journalism profession
2. Colleagues were encouraging and extremely smart. I felt little to no feelings of animosity of politicking which are usually apparent in other workplaces.
3. Pantry, it makes the workplace feel like a home.
4. That air of transparency and openness about what we do. It's refreshing
5. Great communication between countries

Cons

1. Big companies can be unwieldy, but management has handled it well enough with weekly e-mails and town halls. I can't suggest a better alternative for now.
2. Pressure to meet bonuses can be stressful, but that's just part of the job and it motivates you to exceed it.

Advice to Senior Management

There should be more recognition given to the employees working in locations away from the headquarters. It may difficult for now since the world economy is so skewed toward the West but it would do management well to begin paying more attention to operations in Asia and EMEA when the world begins to tilt their way.

Pros

1) Great Benefits. Besides food, health, etc., there are also a lot of great educational opportunities.
2) Smart People. Most of the people working here are really intelligent and a pleasure to work with.

Cons

1) Career paths are almost non-existent, but senior management has been taking many steps over the last few months to fix this. Needs to be seen how this plays out over the next few months.
2) Work experience depends on the team you are in. Some of the teams are really great, but some of them are pretty bad too.
3) Politics. The internal politics can be really bad (again, some teams are better than others).
4) By and large, software practices range from poor to mediocre. There are a few teams that are an exception to this (the infrastructure teams are really great, but product teams tend to be far more "hack a fix, then worry about negative consequences later". The infrastructure team, OTOH, use top notch software engineering practices).
5) The company is a weird mix of transparent, yet opaque. There is a huge effort to appear transparent, but where most important decisions, even at the lowermost levels, are concerned, the decision making process is very opaque.

Advice to Senior Management

1) Take a step back from the tremendous growth in manpower, and focus on inculcating better SW engineering practices at all levels.
2) Focus a little more on the technical side of the business. Senior management comes across as being uninterested in the technical aspects of the business, which is the underpinning of the company's success. Without improving SW engineering practices, there is a great risk that other, more nimble, competitors will outpace BB.

Pros

Great learning curve in the market and cross-asset classes selling.

Cons

Each job rotation is too quick. Often management have little idea of how the actual market is like.