Pros: Not much, unless you have no place to go.

Cons: 1. R&D managers usually hate programming. 2. They do not like CS majors.

Pros: The company as a whole cares about its employees. Benefits are top-notch. Summer parties are the best, and the company has excellent core values. Being a private company has a huge advantage, as the company can invest in its people through education and other perks that are rarely found elsewhere. They also promote volunteer work, being green, and focusing on your health.

Cons: Certain groups in the company can have a really bad working environment or a really awesome working environment. It is hit or miss, which tends to depend on who is managing the group. The company also works with really old technologies, which is not transferable to other companies. The development environment, or lack of one, is really old and not efficient.

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Cons: The technologies they are using are outdated and mostly proprietary.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.