Amazing money minting machine is not actually a meritocracy
Pros
- Insanely profitable business is one of the most eye-popping money making machines you will ever witness, and those riches can be yours, if they like you enough - Willingness to take chances on you, if you succeed, regardless of how young/inexperienced/unqualified you may be on paper; this is great, when you are young and inexperienced, or just lack proper qualifications (no prior sales experience? YOU get to run sales! no business degrees? YOU get to be a COO!) - One of the rare companies where R&D is truly viewed as a profit center, which means your expensive projects with grand scope will usually get approved, even when they shouldn't - The perks are really great, the insurance and benefits are absolute Cadillac grade - you will only find better at a startup with INTERNET money - A lot of the people in the middle and lower ranks of management are actually really good at what they do, work really hard, and can make working there enjoyable
Cons
- Management culture is cult-like, holding loyalty, blood and sweat over real talent and wisdom - Power struggles at the highest levels of the company (most importantly between the CEO and the head of product) tend to have a bigger role in business decisions than actual business - At least a dozen "lifers", who would be utterly unemployable anywhere else, but are worshiped for blood spilled over projects past, hang around in cushy on-the-job retirement positions, billing the company anywhere from $400K-$1.2M annually for jobs that are generally manufactured and pointless ("head of regional businesses", "chief PVF officer") - Core technology stack is so massive and yet painfully old that attempting to modernize it is an asymptotic goal. The great technical genius behind Bloomberg 2, what was supposed to be the future of the company (but will never actually ship), was a plan to move to the latest generation of Windows foundation libraries. Windows in 2012! Recruiting and PR will tell you that Bloomberg is using anything that sounds new and cool and all up in that web stuff. Somewhere, someone is doing that, yes. You won't. If you work in R&D, and if you want to succeed and earn the trust and respect of your peers, you will work on C, maybe some C++, and you will at least see Fortran if not change it. And it won't be good C code. It will be the kind of C code that reads "int one = 2;", written by unskilled recent college graduates that were mentored by managers with history majors. - Uncle Mike's money spigot runs so fast and hard that managers on the product side are rarely held accountable for failures. With 85% of your revenue coming from a single, huge product sold on a flat price model, how do you measure success? The answer always ends up being some bogus metrics, which the good managers will figure out how to juke and/or just magically explain away while proposing next year's bigger, even more expensive plan, that will not only correct the mistakes of last year's plan but also introduce MORE, GLORIOUS MISTAKES. - Severe violation of personal space, this culture has decided that your acceptance is conditional upon their complete and total ownership of your being. Even the most minute discrepancies in your schedule must be reported (publicly) and explained away; all work is logged and diced into spreadsheets put under constant scrutiny; all tickets (and there are zillions of them) go through piles and piles of approvals and re-routing; transparency is taken to an extreme that is disrespectful and psychologically abusive at times.