Bloomberg LP

Many people have commented that there is a lot of legacy code and outdated practices. This is true. However, since upper management within R&D has been shaken up, a large amount of investment is being made in infrastructure and dev practices.

The talent level (at least within my team) is absolutely top-notch.

Difficult and interesting problems.

If you don't like your team, you can move every 18 months.

Very flat hierarchy.

BDE software development methodology.

Amazing guest sparkers.

Increasing its contributions to the open source world (see BDE on Github).

The compensation is good if you are seen as a top performer.

Great health care.

I'm very happy to work for an organization that cares as much about its employees as Bloomberg. I think the company is on a positive trajectory, and the best is yet to come.

• There is an incredible amount of legacy code. Much is old Fortran and C.
• Steep learning curve.
• You'll be capped at four weeks off. I'm not certain, but I think the whole company gets 4 weeks off.
• The high talent level means if you are looking to be a manager, it'll take a while.

Continue to invest in developer productivity and training.

At least within my team, there is always more work to be done than could ever get done. Our project management and bug tracking systems could really use some TLC. Also, we build software like complete amateurs; we should invest in better build management tools. We could also use better automated testing frameworks and facilities.

Improvements are being made; it would just be nice to have a greater emphasis placed on unit and acceptance testing.