Bloomberg reviews

First and foremost, the Analytics and Sales programme, is basically a call-centre. They will try and fancy it up as much as they can, and sell it to you..but it's essentially a customer service call centre, like that of a mobile phone carrier. okay? You will find yourself lying to yourself and telling your friends that you're an "aNaLyst iN FiNaNce" but you're simply a little replaceable tool in the decadent Bloomberg Terminal customer service support.. The company is obsessed with data and micromanagement, especially the Analytics (ADSK) department. They will drive you insane and push the limits of human respect and decency. They will be abusive to you. Read as many positive reviews as you want to convince you otherwise, you will still end up feeling this way or being in denial and paying the mental consequences later. Micromanagement to the extreme, if you go to the toilet, there is a statistic for the time you left your desk and this will impact your salary review/bonus/progression. Lots of politics, if you play the game well you get away with it and succeed, if you're honest and don't cheat, you will never make it. Only smart cheaters win here, not the hard working people. No work from home or other office flexibility, I almost lost my only ID once because Bloomberg wouldn't let me work ONE day from one of their offices in my Country of origin. At the same time they go on social media and brag about their network of offices and flexibility to explore regions and the world/rotational scheme...it's all a lie. The company also promotes the idea of moving intra-department and growing your career and skills, they blocked me 3 times from moving department, they kept me captive in 2 different departments in the same way, and this is because all senior members of the team left and abandoned ship for something more decent than this "job". Clients. Ohhh the clients. Clients verbally abuse you, everyday. EVERY. DAY. They shout at you on the phone, they insult you via the tickets on the customer service. They call you R word, they call you stupid. They threaten you. Have fun if you join. Your schedule is pre-fixed, you have no power over it, you always have to be punctual and on time otherwise management will intimidate you and tell you off, yet if a ticket/client request/meeting overruns your lunch or your end of day, you have to lose your own time, and often lose lunch. This was literally the worst experience in my whole career, many many colleagues lost their minds, some got depressed, some quit without a job, some believe in the corporate dream and are still lost in The Matrix and will end up staying in BBG for the rest of their lives with £2k increase every year, too tired and lazy to try move to a normal company. Company culture is a joke. HR is a joke, their default reply is "sorry, this has to be discussed with your Team Leader”. But the TL have no power, rules always prevail. Mike Bloomberg spends 500millions on Facebook ads for his hopeless presidential campaign and his company hits 11bn revenue, yet his firm pays offensively low salaries, low end of year increases, low bonuses, doesn't provide you with hardware to work from home with, no mid-year salary reviews (even if you change drastically role and seniority in April, you’re stuck on the same salary until March of the year after), sales doesn't get paid commissions!!

Bloomberg is a big company organised into product silos and where you land will make all the difference to your experience (hence the polarity of opinion here). You may or may not end up with an idiot for a team leader, you may find yourself working on proprietary systems, completely isolated from industry standards, business practices and protocols, you might be working in a team with no social cohesion whatsoever. And things can change radically overnight. The team whose company you do enjoy might need you to work on another project in another team or the boss with whom you have a good working relationship might suddenly move back to the US and a clueless, dogmatic, despotic, company-man appear in his place. The hours are long and you will find plenty of colleagues, bereft of social lives, who will show you up by arriving early and leaving long after you go home. Although you will be contractually obliged to work 9 hours per day, expect to consistently work at least 10, many work 12 hours or more. You might work there for years and never have anything challenging or important to work on. There is a company policy known as keeping-the-lights-on which translates to if-it-ain't-broke-don't-fix-it meaning the rate of development progress can be slow as molasses. This is especially frustrating and can be soul destroying for the creatively minded. Technologically, Bloomberg is incapacitated by decisions made decades ago and its terror of losing market share is tangible. This manifests as the front-end looking like something from the 1980s but, worse still, developers are forced to use company-specific versions of tools and programming languages, meaning they will not be able to keep up-to-date with modern versions and practices which is poison for career programmers. It lacks effective testing frameworks and the majority of teams are required to develop, test and release everything themselves, at their own peril. Some teams do have dedicated roles for QA and deployment but there's no company-wide policy. Expect to be called regularly at weekends and unceremoniously at 2AM because the network undergoes maintenance every day and anything consuming tick data will set off alarms when it stops arriving. Promotion to positions of authority is patently based on the Peter Principle and micromanagement and an absolutely obsessive focus on negativity are the norm. It's well known that the Team Leaders and managers often form cabals so just one of them not liking you could spell game over for your position at the company. If this happens, get out before they fire you, and they will - you have been warned.