Bloomberg LP

Non-work related: The pay is pretty good, the building is fancy, and they have free drinks and snacks. There are a lot of outside-of-work activities that are not only offered but also strongly encouraged, such as donations, food/backpack drives, and gardening. Also, there are lots of free tickets given out to cool events in the city that you would otherwise never have access to.

Work related: You get to work on projects that affect a lot of people, and depending on which group you land in, you may love the work you do. The management is less "flat" than what I was told it was like when I joined (early 2009), but there are definitely fewer hierarchical barriers than at most other places.

Bloomberg has tons and tons of legacy code, mostly in Fortran and C. To add insult to injury, it's rarely commented, documented, or explained in any shape or form. When you make a function call, you often enter magic land.

While there are no new Fortran files (company policy), you will almost certainly have to at least look at lots of Fortran when debugging it. You may need to make code additions for bug fixes.

Bloomberg is a fast-paced company (due to it being driven by finance). This means that you focus on getting the final product done ASAP, which can be exciting. However, you will rarely get the chance to take time and properly design and develop a product, or refactor old code that, while not technically broken, is inefficient.

Please make active efforts to reduce technical debt in the code. Even if it's not broken, it's killing us all slowly to have to deal with it (at least, all us programmers), and it's adding time and money to our projects to have to deal with legacy hacks. If you reduce technical debt, you won't see a payout this year, but you will thank me 5 years from now.