Pros
- If you know how to "play the game" with internal politics you can do well - People don't tend to get sacked even if they're bad performers - Depending on your personality and age, you can make friends - Good efforts in terms of diversity and inclusion - The company is a monopoly/duopoly/oligopoly in a number of sectors where it operates, so clients have little choice but to buy from Bloomberg
Cons
In a nutshell, the problem is the micromanagement culture, whether you're in Sales or Analytics, no matter how "strategic" and "advanced" they try to make your role sound, you'll still work in a call center mode, even if you're in Enterprise Sales looking after multi-million contracts. Everything's tracked in the system, giving manager alerts to breathe over your neck at all times and control who you're meeting, when, what time you get in in the morning, when you go for lunch, what time you leave in the evening, etc. Managers do actively check this, including the most senior people who you would think have more important things to do. This creates stress and mental health problems for many people which leads to managers thinking you're a "snowflake", with some of them bragging about having worked in the company for 2 decades without calling in sick any single day during this time. More detailed points below: - I still meet lots of ex colleagues as friends and I think the majority are extremely unhappy with the job - I've never seen so many people on mental health leave due to being so negatively affected by the micromanagement culture - No matter what role you do, the entire dynamic is that of a call center. That's the case primarily for ADSK/Analytics. You may need to be smart ane educated to work in that department, but no matter how much they sugarcoat it, it's still a call/support centre (this also affects your ability to find other more strategic jobs in other companies if you ever want to) - You're treated as a child, with very young and inexperienced managers being extra "harsh/mean" because they think that's the only way to get your respect. They check daily what time you get in, they control what time you can have lunch and leave at the end of the day and you can't be late or early not even 1 minute (again, it's a call center) - You'll likely spend years before you're allowed to move to Sales, the promised land, but once you're there, you'll realise you're just a "travelling call center", meeting clients primarily interested in you solving their product bugs/queries rather than having the "strategic/proactive" conversations your manager wants you to have with them to sell them more stuff - You don't have much control of where you take your career, they push you where they need people and it's a bit of a lottery if you end up in a good team with a good manager and supporting/selling a good product or you can end up in a terrible team where the product you're responsible to sell to clients is inferior to competitors, full of bugs and making every conversation with clients about complaints where they can yell at you - A lot of the skills you'll learn are only valuable if you want to stay in Bloomberg forever, otherwise, other FinTech companies won't easily value your experience in Sales or Product Management - Every few months you're pushed to do a training that comes with an exam. That's good in terms of learning new things, but the expectation is that you use your evenings and weekends to study for the exams. 99% of what you learn is specific to the Bloomberg product and it's not knowledge that will be useful if you take it with yourself somewhere else.