Bloomberg LP

Great benefits: a good 401K plan (most of my plan recovered from the market crash as of the end of 2010) with a good match. Four weeks of vacation even for junior employees, unlimited sick days (theoretically, depends on your relationship with the manager, if he trusts you, and how good you are with the "system" – bring doctor notes when in doubt). Relatively good dental, vision, and medical plans, but the medical plan got worse over the years (larger copays, etc., but it's a country-wide issue).

Lots of incompetent people are promoted to managers—those who scream the loudest or just because they were good developers or got lucky (every other senior person left the team), but it doesn't mean they make good managers. It is very easy to be demoted (as part of a reorganization, etc.). I haven't seen it happen as much in other companies. Unfortunately, the incompetent managers always seem to stick around; it is the good managers who usually suffer.

R&D (programming dept) uses a lot of "in-house" technologies, and public/mainstream technologies which it uses are technologically way behind other companies. There is still lots of C and Fortran code to deal with. New development is done in Javascript (not web-based) and C++, but the company switched to C++ only about 5 years ago, and to Javascript about 3-4 years ago when everyone else had done it decades ago. The more you stay in the company, especially if you stay in one of the R&D groups which doesn't deal with financial instruments directly, the less marketable you'll become should you decide to leave the company.

The pay is above average for junior developers, but tapers off once you become a senior developer. After discussing this with my friends in the company over the years, it almost feels like you hit some kind of a glass ceiling after 8-10 years in the company, unless you are a superstar (which means you have no personal life), some kind of a genius, become a manager, AND have enough marketing skills to market yourself to your manager before your annual review.

Theoretically, the company has a "work from home" policy now and some flexible work programs. In practice, this policy has been very limited and mostly used by middle-chain managers.

Lots more pressure on developers once the company instituted the "Plan B" reorganization; sometimes it's way too much.

That said, everything totally depends on the team you're on. Even within the same group in R&D, there are good teams where developers are happy and stay for years, while in other groups developers are buried with work and work 12 hours a day until they transfer to a different team or quit.

Please be very careful as to who you make the managers and don't trust that person blindly; listen to employees on the team.

If several employees quit or transfer to a different team because of excessive pressure, but the manager still shows "great" results on paper, does that mean that this person is still a good manager? In the long run, employee turnover is never good for the company.

Employees should be able to voice their concerns anonymously anytime or more frequently, not with a very rigid once-a-year employee feedback.