Pros: - Great pay - Great benefits (no-fee health insurance, access to NYC & London museums for free) - 3-month new hire training program is a good opportunity to make some friends

Cons: Everything at Bloomberg is legacy. Code runs directly on hardware, on machines in the data farms. Some servers are IBM and Solaris, not Linux, and don’t even support C++ compilers from 2011. Most senior devs have been in the company since college and haven’t learned anything new about the world of coding for years. It is tough when your team lead is both a friendly person but also hasn’t heard of basic coding tools, like `curl`. I have friends who entered the company with me just a year or so ago out of college and spend most of their time writing Fortran. (If you don’t know what Fortran is, and you’re under 40, that’s probably a good thing.) Bloomberg Terminal frontend apps are written in an esoteric JavaScript framework called Rapid, which is a major headache and won’t help you build skills in any modern frontend framework. Bloomberg is a good first job out of college in that you get great pay and great benefits, and can use that to establish yourself in a new city (probably NYC) and save up some money/pay off loans. But if you care about growing as a developer, and if you will be unhappy in an organization where people aren’t passionate and there are few opportunities to really learn, leave quickly.

Pros: Nice company, I enjoyed working there. It genuinely cared for its employees. There was a good atmosphere, great perks like the pantry and the amazing family-friendly summer party, continuous learning with lots of offerings for online and face-to-face training, and the flexible working-from-home policy, with all the tech in the office supporting people connecting from home or collaborating remotely. Great engineering community. Very good philanthropy and volunteering culture. I felt proud to be part of Bloomberg and have so many genuine opportunities to make an impact. Comp was good, but not as good as in other Big Tech or finance companies, at least back then (I left a few years ago).

Cons: Too much outdated, proprietary tech; I felt a lot of it wouldn't be useful in my next jobs. It was hard to use cutting-edge tech. Employees could have a totally different experience, great or awful, depending on their management chain. And not much was done to quickly correct management issues leading to stress, anxiety, and attrition.

Pros: Relative stability, long tenure, some colleagues are friendly (some).

Cons: Middle-manager very opinionated, very old technologies, against any innovation, boring, boring and boring.