Firm level:
Terrible "stupid" hiring policy (this is not confidential anymore, search on quora): the HR will throw out the resume without looking if the candidate was a former Bloomberg employee, or even worse, that this person had declined an offer from Bloomberg before. (How are you going to compete in such a competitive market for tech talent?)
Performance review is stack ranking based and the managers have the full say. As a result, employees are discouraged to share knowledge, but fight politics internally to be close to the managers. Individual contributors are less likely to disagree with the managers/TLs' idea. Wrong person get promoted/demoted time to time, not because of performance, but as a result of political matter.
R&D level
Poor software practice in the R&D, where almost non-existence of the automated software testing (not even at the unit-test level). The company encourage employees to be innovative firm-wide, however in practice, engineers are discouraged (indirectly) to innovate due to fear of breaking things. I personally knew at least 2 engineers were fired due to the production bugs they created. From my knowledge, the most senior managers in R&D are technical with some of the good visions. However, many of the mid, mid-senior level managers, are not technical at all. These people are usually the decision makers and I saw many missteps in the decision making progress during my 5 years there.
Lack of developer productivity tools. Most engineers are still on vim/emacs and at the time I left, there's not a fully integrated SDK available. Eclipse is used, as only an editor.
