Pros: I'm on a product that impacts many clients. As a result, there's always lots of work to do, from implementing new features to optimizing performance. My team almost feels like a startup, in that each person's contributions are valued and needed.

Cons: As the product I work on is already pretty mature, the features I work on sometimes feel like micro-optimizations to an already very stable product. I would like to see more analytics from features we ship, and would like to be more involved in what we do with such feedback. It seems like we never look back, and even if we create a feature that isn't used, we never seem to ask why. We always have tight deadlines ahead of us, and so implementing these new features takes priority. Sometimes I wonder what the product vision is.

Pros: Nice perks and snacks. Friendly securities; actually, they are the most friendly people in BB.

Cons: Work is extremely boring. A lot of times, a well-trained high schooler could do the job, with much more passion. Developers are being abused by business people and threatened by upper management when they are not happy with your work. I found it funny and pathetic that even my manager is trying real hard to kiss a business analyst's ass. Most managers are incompetent and lack leadership. The reason they are managers is that a lot of people run away after 1-2 years, so upper management has to pick from what's left. A Wall Street recruiter I talked to asked me, "Why 80% of resumes he received are from Bloombergs..." You figure out why.

Pros: Non-work related: The pay is pretty good, the building is fancy, and they have free drinks and snacks. There are a lot of outside-of-work activities that are not only offered but also strongly encouraged, such as donations, food/backpack drives, and gardening. Also, there are lots of free tickets given out to cool events in the city that you would otherwise never have access to. Work related: You get to work on projects that affect a lot of people, and depending on which group you land in, you may love the work you do. The management is less "flat" than what I was told it was like when I joined (early 2009), but there are definitely fewer hierarchical barriers than at most other places.

Cons: Bloomberg has tons and tons of legacy code, mostly in Fortran and C. To add insult to injury, it's rarely commented, documented, or explained in any shape or form. When you make a function call, you often enter magic land. While there are no new Fortran files (company policy), you will almost certainly have to at least look at lots of Fortran when debugging it. You may need to make code additions for bug fixes. Bloomberg is a fast-paced company (due to it being driven by finance). This means that you focus on getting the final product done ASAP, which can be exciting. However, you will rarely get the chance to take time and properly design and develop a product, or refactor old code that, while not technically broken, is inefficient.