Pros: There's a huge variety of teams in Bloomberg Engineering, all working in a bunch of different technology areas, including UI design for the Bloomberg Terminal, backend and distributed systems, software infrastructure, data science and machine learning, etc. The tech culture is really great, with frequent "Guild" meetups that present talks and workshops on different areas such as: * C++ * Python * JavaScript * Automated Testing * ML * NLP * Distributed Systems There are other communities, such as Bloomberg Women in Tech (BWIT) and Bloomberg Black in Tech (BBIT), that host frequent conversations about improving diversity within tech and within Bloomberg. There's also a huge emphasis on volunteering within the company. You're even encouraged to take time out of your working day to volunteer (this could be cleaning up streets and parks in London, or helping out at a food bank, etc.). Volunteer hours accumulate, and if you volunteer 25 hours in a year, the company will donate several thousand dollars to a charity of your choice (and a greater amount for 50 hours).

Cons: None I can think of.

Pros: Great building, competitive salary, excellent benefits package, multi-cultural environment. If you are fresh from college, have no work experience, or would like to find someone to date, an excellent place to work! Unlikely to get fired for any reason. Free food. Really high turnover, so you may get a sales job even if you were a programmer.

Cons: The technology is ancient (the majority). A lot of programmers are simply maintaining legacy code (Fortran, C) that cannot be retired or converted. The company also uses a ton of proprietary software, all developed in-house. For example, they've created their own Service-Oriented Architecture (ala WSDL), two home-grown databases, an entire UI framework, and other things.

Pros: A high degree of personal ownership in projects means that if you're on a solid team, you can contribute almost immediately.

Cons: Serious issues with reinventing the wheel, neglecting useful open-source alternatives, and in many places completely ignoring proper software development practices like continuous integration, unit testing, integration testing, etc. Proprietary everything means your skills are largely not transferable.