Bloomberg LP

• Great pay
• Great benefits (no-fee health insurance, access to NYC & London museums for free)
• 3-month new hire training program is a good opportunity to make some friends

Everything at Bloomberg is legacy. Code runs directly on hardware, on machines in the data farms. Some servers are IBM and Solaris, not Linux, and don’t even support C++ compilers from 2011.

Most senior devs have been in the company since college and haven’t learned anything new about the world of coding for years. It is tough when your team lead is both a friendly person but also hasn’t heard of basic coding tools, like curl.

I have friends who entered the company with me just a year or so ago out of college and spend most of their time writing Fortran. (If you don’t know what Fortran is, and you’re under 40, that’s probably a good thing.) Bloomberg Terminal frontend apps are written in an esoteric JavaScript framework called Rapid, which is a major headache and won’t help you build skills in any modern frontend framework.

Bloomberg is a good first job out of college in that you get great pay and great benefits, and can use that to establish yourself in a new city (probably NYC) and save up some money/pay off loans. But if you care about growing as a developer, and if you will be unhappy in an organization where people aren’t passionate and there are few opportunities to really learn, leave quickly.

1. Better communication across teams.

I worked on a floor with pretty much all the teams that worked on the data platform and never ever talked to them. Requests in between teams went nowhere and blocked progress for days. Conway's Law comes to mind.

1. Maybe just hire some smart consultants?

Most of the senior devs who have stuck around at Bloomberg are still there because they are not the more passionate, non-complacent devs who have left. Senior devs with great architectural minds will go elsewhere. Get some short-term, experienced & passionate developers who can stick around for enough time to introduce some new ideas / build strategies to improve Bloomberg's tech stack.

1. Get younger, passionate devs on the best teams.

There are some cool teams at Bloomberg. And there were a bunch of bright people in my new hire class. Yet almost everyone got thrown onto teams where they were/are maintaining huge monolithic systems probably written in the early 90s.