Bloomberg LP

Your experience will greatly differ depending on what team you join. The following only applies to my particular experience in a particular team.

Company-wide:

• Relaxed environment.
• Free food.
• Nice office.
• Good benefits.
• Paid volunteering opportunities.
• Free/discounted tickets for cool events.
• Good culture.
• People are generally nice and there are many talented employees that you can talk to for advice/discussion.
• Salary is slightly lower than other similar companies.

Team specific:

• Chance to experiment with new technologies.
• Open to feedback/new ideas.
• Decent workflow compared to many other teams, less legacy technologies. If you decide to join Bloomberg, do yourself a favour and choose a team that isn't stuck with development practices and technologies from 20 years ago.

Your experience will greatly differ depending on what team you join. The following only applies to my particular experience in a particular team.

Company-wide:

• Too many people are being hired without the required skillset. For example, many new developers with no previous C++ experience are trained on C++ for two weeks, then start writing production code. You can imagine the results.
• Legacy technology, legacy infrastructure. This varies from team to team, but in general, every technology used here is quite old and a pain to work with. Want to use a library from GitHub? Good luck. Bloomberg has its own potentially-incompatible C++ Standard Library implementation. Want to use C++14? Nope, ancient compilers are used to support obsolete architectures.

Team specific:

• Most of the work is not engaging or interesting and revolves around the implementation of business logic with no real algorithmic or performance challenge at all.
• You are encouraged to make the code "as simple as possible for new hires." Instead, hire people who know the language being used well.
• Working from home is a perk of the company, but I find it very hard to do without feeling like my manager is upset about it. I wish this were encouraged and easier to schedule as long as people are doing their job. When I'm writing a component, I don't need to be in the office. Just let me do my work and come to the office when it's beneficial to everyone.

More carefully select people and direct them to teams inside the company where their skillset is valuable. This is done for seniors, but not for new hires. I think this is a huge mistake, which decreases the quality of software and makes people run away.

Encourage people to work remotely; some employees are more productive and happier that way.