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.

Pros: Good snacks. Compensation is okay, but that's not the only thing any good software developer expects in a job. Also, having good reviews only about the food and compensation for any software development company is shameful.

Cons: Management is pathetic, especially those hired straight from college (with only bachelor's, and not even in computer science) and made team leads within 2-3 years. First, they don't have good and deeper technical knowledge as they don't necessarily have all basic computer science background and understanding of the product as a whole. Having knowledge just about a language (like C/C++) is not the same as having actual product development knowledge. Second, since they are straight out of college, they don't have any outside experience and they feel that they do amazing work, while actually, it's not the case. Also, they are just too random/impetuous and irresponsible in their decisions. These guys just tend to make their Evals/Compensation better by making their team members work the way their managers expect them to. Nowhere in all this is actual product development given more importance. They give more importance to the actual number of hours worked rather than the efficiency and output. Also here, more importance is given to the number of bugs fixed, rather than actually finding the root causes and reducing the number of bugs generated in the first place. That's the reason why sometimes it's more of a mechanical work/mechanical temporary fixes than good, challenging work which requires talent. These team leads don't give any credit to the team members who actually work on it, but rather will try to explain their contribution in any good thing the members do. It's hard for smart/talented computer science people to strive in the company. The company just needs to maintain their random codebase by continually adding new things without any good design, introducing new bugs in existing things, fixing them to introduce something new... one day that can end up beyond repair!

Pros: The best learning experiences were in core C++, server-side coding, templates, and JavaScript asynchronous frameworks, etc. Then, out of nowhere, a reorg happens, and you are left with nothing that you built with so much hard work. Good pay, amazing benefits (best in NYC), a pretty building, rarely fires (always puts people on performance plans), very fast learning. The CEO discussed voluntary work that I did with them. They have amazing matches for community involvement (they matched $5,000 to my charity for my voluntary hours).

Cons: Too many reorgs (not just my team but others too). Very competitive; hard to get an "exceeds expectations." Proprietary tech, at times too fast-paced, with a steeper learning curve.