Pros: Pay is good. Business is slowing down now, but even during the financial crisis, I got pretty good pay and bonuses. A lot of my coworkers quit and work for Google, and they're getting less vacation and about the same salary. Good benefits. Four weeks vacation, good medical and dental insurance (used to be free, but now it's $400 a year or so), and other perks like free entrance to museums and occasional tickets to high-society type events through the company's philanthropy. Nice office in a nice location, with beautiful tropical fish and free snacks.

Cons: The technologies they are using are outdated and mostly proprietary. You can become an expert in those technologies, and it will make you more valuable to Bloomberg, but not to anyone else. Perhaps not if you work in a few groups (mobile, bloomberg.com, Bloomberg Government) which use mainstream technologies, but the vast majority of programmers are working on the Bloomberg Terminal, which doesn't really use any modern, marketable technology. Good job security has a price: there are a lot of really bad programmers who break things or never get any work done, and they never get fired. Depending on your team, you could work with smart people, but you might also work with a lot of dumb people. Hours can be long, and you're pretty much expected to be on-call 24/7, ready to log in and debug issues at 4 AM when the London market opens. It's a global business, but most software teams are only in New York, and in some teams, you can get woken up very frequently to fix overseas issues.

Pros: Good pay. New York. The financial knowledge involved in learning the product. The CFA's training classes are keeping the internship program afloat. A pantry, if you have never seen one.

Cons: This company is anything but Hogwarts, even when Hogwarts was being torn down. This company is Ron Weasley with a broken wand. The technology is so outdated, it's unbelievable that they still lead the industry, just like it's unbelievable that Ron gets with Hermione. A lot of employees have never had any experience outside of Bloomberg because they are that stupid; they never get hired elsewhere. Finding an employee who has experience at a decent company like Amazon or Google is nearly impossible because Bloomberg does not attract quality. Forget Amazon and Google; finding an engineer with a computer science background is difficult at Bloomberg. The project assigned to me was so terrible, I am embarrassed to put it on my resume. As an intern, it was painful to realize that all engineers surrounding me were unbelievably stupid. One engineer (over 2 years) did not even understand Git, even though his code was using Git. Speaking of Git, a lot of the repositories I saw had no .gitignore. And even though they have GitHub, almost nobody uses it because, did I mention? They are that stupid. If Google or Microsoft ever decided to get into the financial industry, they could easily take out Bloomberg. This company has hammered my expectations of working in a corporate setting, which may be a good thing. If you have a degree in anything other than computer science, you will adore this place. The current employees are not passionate about the product as much as they are passionate about New York. The conversion rate for interns is unbelievably low because nobody wants to experience hell twice.

Pros: - New London office is very nice. - Good management: My team lead, manager, manager^2, and manager^3 are all excellent. They're enthusiastic, know the product, and have programming backgrounds. I'm confident about the direction they're leading my team in and the work we're doing, and they're invested in cleaning up the tech debt created by previous management. They also know and care about the team, each of them knowing me, my skills, shortcomings, and desires. My team lead especially has pushed to give me opportunities to advance and have a greater positive impact at Bloomberg. - Good compensation.

Cons: - Legacy tech stack. We're working on cleaning this up, but in the area I work, there's a considerable amount of C and Fortran code. Most of it is quite nasty. C is converted to C++ when we touch it, and Fortran is 99% just being read to debug a problem and not modified. I have had to change it a few times though in the last 12 months. - Long hours. 8-6 are the contracted hours, but I work more like 8:30-6. My manager is explicitly not fussed about what time you arrive or leave, as long as you get your work done. I'd rather work 9-5, but I'm paid enough to live with it.