Pros: Pays well, stable, lots of potential -- in some alternate universe.

Cons: 90-hour weeks, stifling bureaucracy, backstabbing politics, personal degradation, self-destructive technology choices. Think of it as being chained in a salt mine with open sores. Living in New York is a special kind of hell, too.

Pros: Good pay. Prestigious name on the resume. Work here only for the name and short duration. Stepping stone for higher ground.

Cons: Really hectic culture. They will make you work long hours. Management will give you small projects to work on. Take your commitment on the projects and then throw a lot of bug fixes and maintenance requests in parallel. I have more than 10 years of professional experience, out of which most of the experience is non-Bloomberg. None of the places are as bad as this one. I wouldn't work here. These people are still using legacy technologies like: * Fortran * ProgressDB etc., which will make you not marketable. A lot of people I know were brought in, giving assurances that you will get the opportunity to work on a .net environment, which rarely happens. They would give you some projects in the beginning and bury you in maintenance requests. Management spent 70% of their time in meetings and will expect you to find out what, when, how, and why of a problem which you don't know anything about. They may pay you higher than market, but at the end of the day, you will end up billing 10 to 11 hours a day. I would rather consult and not take any benefits.

Pros: Great pay, especially for entry-level engineers. Decent perks, and good work-life balance.

Cons: Inter-team communication could be better.