Senior Software Engineer • Current Employee
Pros: Good WLB
Most teams, you can get by with doing minimal work (low effort).
Decent Pay
Safe company.
Known name in the industry.
Cons: - No room for advancement, since it's a flat org there's no role you can aim for that's higher than senior. Unless you want to be in management.
- Old hierarchy structure. Most tech companies offer two paths for advancement that the industry follows now. You can either continue as an engineer or go into management. Becoming Staff and furthering your technical career or becoming a people manager are two separate paths because not all good engineers are good people persons.
- The tech that this company uses is old, like 80s architecture old. The codebase is old as well. There's been no effort made to rewrite most of the code and the people who wrote this code are either retired or moved on. These are not small services but essential to the company, and people are afraid of touching them.
- The problems you face here as a dev are going to be mostly bureaucracy then code, a lot of meetings to just make a simple change or feature change.
- The industry has moved on from a lot of the internal tooling, and Bloomberg is having a hard time changing internally due to various causes like refusal to invest in an actual CI/CD team per department.
- Product is seen as the overlords telling devs what to do. No one does this anymore; this relationship seems toxic for engineers as it favors the old way of thinking one is better than the other.