Bloomberg L.P. Employee Review

Former Employee – worked at Bloomberg L.P.

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.

Yes, I would recommend this company to a friend