Bloomberg LP

• Benefits.

The benefits are comparable, sometimes even better than other large tech companies like Google and Facebook.

Aside from the pay, there's free food, free premium health care, extremely high 401k matching, and a very relaxed, yet fast for a large company, culture.

Aside from the mentioned, experienced hires receive financial advisers and lawyers for extremely low cost (around $16 a month, I think).

Oh, and a minimum of 4 weeks vacation and unlimited work from home/sick days.

• Transparency.

This is one of the biggest advantages to this company over others.

You can literally view any Bloomberg code you want at any time you want.

The only restrictions in the company are really the law branch (for obvious reasons).

Everything is out in the open, and this lets work complete significantly faster than other companies of this size.

• Culture.

While maintaining competition, coworkers are generally all extremely helpful and come from some impressive backgrounds.

I've yet to come across anyone that's not willing to help out at all.

At most, I've had help deferred due to an urgent issue, but I've hardly run into any instances where I've failed to receive help.

• Management.

Not much to say here other than I have never worked with a company of this size having this type of technical expertise, ever.

I can comfortably speak about C code to management two levels above me without any communication issues because they've all been through as a C/C++ developer at some point.

• Career Opportunities.

Now, this depends on individuals' goals, but coming from a small company in the financial industry, I've found that opportunities here are very limited.

After you've worked in the industry for some time, projects complete and they turn into maintenance mode (aka "keeping the lights on") in the company. This is a very necessary evil since once functions complete, support needs to remain for the function, but this lowers the amount of meaningful work that can be done.

Those that want to change things up will generally be pointed towards the direction of management.

• Challenges.

This expands on the above point. Unfortunately, the amount of challenges in this company is very limited.

The problems can be difficult, but with the wrong reasons. This includes challenges from compliance, poor design, and complex internal architecture. There's significantly less "fun" challenges in the work compared to a startup or smaller shop.

This can lead to some days that feel terribly long due to working on mind-numbing tasks. All companies will have these tasks, but Bloomberg seems to have a lot more to do due to their extensive use of proprietary tools.

• Legacy technologies.

Bloomberg is involved with "modern" technologies like Hadoop/HBase and Redis, but a very large portion of the foundation software is still C++98 (with a Bloomberg Standard Library to cover some of the C++11 features), but the technology lags behind significantly due to all the dependencies in the software.

Not much to advise here, since a lot of the problems that come up are inevitable in a large company. The quality of employees here is pretty top-notch, and the benefits are absolutely nothing to complain about.