Toxic military-style culture stuck in the past
Pros
- Fair amount of stability, ie. you don't get sacked unless you make a really big mistake - Nice offices with snacks and travel policy - Some colleagues can be very smart - They try to do a good job with Diversity & Inclusion Mind you: many of the above pros may even disappear once the company is sold, which is highly likely to happen in the next few months/years (google it)
Cons
- Horrible culture of micromanagement: your boss is always looking on the system what time you arrive in the morning, go out for lunch, leave the offices. You can't be there a single minute after 8AM or leave a single minute before 6PM. That's the case no matter how senior your job may be, with the exception of a few lucky ones that get a really nice manager, but then that gets changed very often as well; - Idea that "success needs to be painful": you're constantly asked to take courses and exams of the product in your own time (ie. evenings and weekends), they name & shame amongst management who passes and fails the exams; - Related to the above, you're also expected to travel for work very early in the morning (5-7am) and 6pm onwards so you can work the full day in the office and only then head to the airport, so again, using your own time for work; - If you work in Sales or Analytics, a good half (easily more) of your customers will be unhappy with Bloomberg (they only have it because in many areas they have a monopoly), so you'll be in a situation where your managers are pushing you every Monday morning in the Sales meeting to sell more but your customers will just be complaining about product bugs every time you see them - particularly if you look after any of the Enterprise products instead of the terminal; - Call centre culture: it doesn't matter what department you're in, can be Analytics, Sales, Finance, HR or anything - all your tasks are being tracked in a case management style system that tracks when you got a request (in HR to issue a salary letter, in IT to provide an employee a new laptop, in Analytics to answer a query from a client, etc), when you closed the request, how long it took, how that compares vs the avg time and number of requests that peers in your team processed and then, again, your manager randomly reviews your work and scores you; - Lots of politics: literally management has sometimes said in small forums that it's not about doing a good job but about your personal marketing. Mind you, this may be the case in lots of jobs, but Bloomberg takes it to the extreme, where it's about 70% about sending out emails and chats shouting about every little thing that you do, with only 30% being about actually doing things that deliver value. You won't progress your career unless you "play the game" Reach out to people on LinkedIn who both work there as well as HAVE WORKED there and ask them about the culture before you join.