Pros: Nice benefits and higher than average pay. Free snacks and drinks, and various training programs. Larger than normal bonus packages.

Cons: The atmosphere at Bloomberg is very "high schoolish." A lot of insecure people trying to justify their job when it could be very easily eliminated. Tons of bloat and bureaucracy. Not a place where you want to work if you want to work in a typical software development environment. If you like to re-invent the wheel or work on Fortran, this place is for you. If you want to gain real skills to help you grow technically, look elsewhere.

Pros: It's very bright and sunny, which might seem trivial, but I personally find it very good for my mood to work in a bright office. I like the financial aspects of the work, so once I found the team working on precisely what I was interested in, I became quite happy and satisfied. Don't worry too much about the "free food"; most of it is junk food, though the fruit is great. If you like finance more than cutting-edge software engineering, you'll find it a pleasant enough place to work at (on the good teams). The bad teams, well, they are out there; do your homework before accepting the offer.

Cons: Some of the infrastructure is legacy. This shouldn't be a con for any seasoned developer; it's a fact of life. However, if you're a whiny b**** straight out of college, you might find this distasteful. There is some politicking, and people get promoted partially based on their temperament and how well they get along with other managers. Again, this shouldn't be a con, but if you are young and naive, you might find this also to be distasteful. The only really big con is the annual review process, which is a curve-fitted algorithm to award future compensation based on relative (within your peer group) performance. I would advise newcomers to negotiate as hard as you can before signing, because once you are in, there's a good possibility your compensation will stagnate.

Pros: Good pay, good benefits, free food, classes for employee development, and philanthropy.

Cons: Long hours, lots of legacy code, inflexible development process, work culture indirectly discourages teamwork, proprietary system, bureaucratic.