Bloomberg LP

Compared to other Computer Science job opportunities in New York City and elsewhere in the field, Bloomberg offers some pretty attractive packages. The benefits are great, the workplace is vibrant, and most coworkers are competent.

The biggest downside is that the company is divorced from Silicon Valley and its ways, making it hard for former Bloomberg employees to return to greener pastures.

The projects are effectively managed by the sales organization, which is eager to please the customers. This often results in making impossible promises, rushing projects, and asking for shortcuts left and right.

As a result, the code is chaotic and archaic, and in bad need of huge rewrites and lots more testing.

Some of the projects are ill-conceived from the start. Several projects in my team that took months to develop received little or no use from customers. The salesperson that asked for the feature, having signed up the client, has no interest in pushing your product.

Your experience varies significantly depending on who your immediate manager is. It may vary as far as the flexibility of your workday. Some managers expect you to be at work no later than 9:00, and some others recognize that the flexibility to choose, within reason, what time you come to work in the morning will affect your output.

The management needs to have a larger attention span and make more bottom-up decisions. The inherent distrust between the sales and R&D organizations will only heal if the developers have a chance at fixing the architectural chaos that makes development at Bloomberg so hard.