Bloomberg LP

Great benefits, great workplace, lots of interesting people around all the time, free food, livery cab or free parking across the street for folks working late or early shifts, excellent commuting location, very nice annual company picnic.

Good place to work if it's your first job out of college, or if you want to move up in the world a little bit.

Extremely good and efficient workflow management through the company's organic ticketing system makes documentation and milestone tracking a breeze, and greatly improves teamwork.

Remuneration is low for the location. Bonus awards come in the form of equity, which is given with an estimated value and allowed to mature for a year, then they're cashed out based on actual value. Don't expect high award amounts either; there's a lot of expensive tropical fish to feed, and by God, they always come first.

Low-level management has a great deal of autonomy, far beyond most workplaces. Mid and high-level management is okay and is mostly composed of professional folks, but they don't do any dirty work. It's the low-level managers who do, and they can be prima donnas, especially if they have an axe to grind. For that reason, brown-nosing is rampant through pretty much every department, and you'll find a lot of folks eager to drink the Bloomberg cool-aid just to keep their jobs because they live in fear.

If you get along with your boss, you'll be okay. However, if you don't and he or she has it out for you, they'll make your life impossible in every way they can until you're fed up, or just fire you outright. When this happens, treatment of employees is often arbitrary, and conflicts come up over trivial things. By which I mean that you'll be singled out for 'performance issues' while other people sit at their PCs and play fantasy football all day and not even get a talking to.

Your job description might also change to demand you get skills you didn't need before, either because someone else got fired or because of a new responsibility placed on the department which might be similar or related to your career path. Bloomberg has an internal computer-based learning system with many courses free of charge, but should your new responsibilities require skills that fall outside of training that is internally offered, you'll find you will not get anything beyond a list of local training centers offering the course or certification you'll need to get a good review.

On-the-job training is nonexistent because those who do have the knowledge are too busy to handhold those who don't until they get the hang of their new responsibilities, at least beyond the most basic aspects. Employees are generally responsible to pay for any out-of-house training if their job description changes for any reason, which must be done outside of work hours.

Don't expect any loyalty from anyone in management; everyone is replaceable at the drop of a hat, no matter their past contributions. But it feels like all of the above is a very well-put-together management style because it's so consistent across departments. Like, for example, the fact that no one in the building has an office; it's all an open floor plan, and the most anyone might have is a glass-segregated seating space.

So, bottom line, the company's not for everyone.

I would enhance the employee grievance review process and make it more transparent, less arbitrary. The company runs the way it runs because of its management style, and I can't really fault that.