Bloomberg LP

Food is great. The location and building are very good. The pay is okay. There are some real bright people at developer levels.

This company, though mainly based on the main terminal software, can never become a true software development company. And the worst part is management don't have the vision to see this happening. This is mainly because most of the middle management (team leads) is filled with people having no development experience apart from Bloomberg itself, and that too a lot of non-computer science people.

What senior management should understand is that there is a subtle difference between just programming and actual software development. Anyone from any background can learn programming or a language/scripting within a short frame. However, that does not necessarily indicate that they can develop good software. Unfortunately, people here don't understand this.

And since the leadership at the technical level has these major lacks, the company is losing key talents at the developer level who are never allowed/given a chance for good development techniques due to the middle layer (mainly because leads have never done that and they just want their juniors to follow what they say).

Eventually, good developers will leave the company and go to a better place. No compensation/other benefits can stop this happening, but just the cleanup of the middle layer. That's precisely the reason the software isn't that great enough; it's still in the market because it does not have a real software company as a competitor in Financial Markets.

The day isn't far when companies like Google, MS seize this opportunity and bring better financial software to market, which will definitely put the company in a lot of trouble.

In the software field, one has to continuously improve to stay relevant in the market and cannot just rely on predefined or traditional methods/technologies.

Also, please do some real thinking about the review process, the reviews that are done, and middle management selection. These are mostly done on the basis of favoritism and who shows off more work than actual work.