Bloomberg LP

Good snacks.

Compensation is okay, but that's not the only thing any good software developer expects in a job. Also, having good reviews only about the food and compensation for any software development company is shameful.

Management is pathetic, especially those hired straight from college (with only bachelor's, and not even in computer science) and made team leads within 2-3 years. First, they don't have good and deeper technical knowledge as they don't necessarily have all basic computer science background and understanding of the product as a whole. Having knowledge just about a language (like C/C++) is not the same as having actual product development knowledge. Second, since they are straight out of college, they don't have any outside experience and they feel that they do amazing work, while actually, it's not the case. Also, they are just too random/impetuous and irresponsible in their decisions. These guys just tend to make their Evals/Compensation better by making their team members work the way their managers expect them to. Nowhere in all this is actual product development given more importance. They give more importance to the actual number of hours worked rather than the efficiency and output. Also here, more importance is given to the number of bugs fixed, rather than actually finding the root causes and reducing the number of bugs generated in the first place. That's the reason why sometimes it's more of a mechanical work/mechanical temporary fixes than good, challenging work which requires talent. These team leads don't give any credit to the team members who actually work on it, but rather will try to explain their contribution in any good thing the members do.

It's hard for smart/talented computer science people to strive in the company. The company just needs to maintain their random codebase by continually adding new things without any good design, introducing new bugs in existing things, fixing them to introduce something new... one day that can end up beyond repair!

Be wise in evaluating intermediate team leads; they don't do the work they pretend to/talk about. The core work is being done by actual team members.