Bloomberg Software Engineer reviews

(Your experience will GREATLY differ depending on what team you join. The following only applies to my particular experience in a particular team.) Company-wide: * Too many people are being hired without the required skillset. E.g. many new developers with no previous C++ experience are trained on C++ for 2 weeks then start writing production code. You can imagine the results. * Legacy technology, legacy infrastructure. This varies from team to team, but in general every technology used here is quite hold and a PITA to work with. Want to use a library from GitHub? Good luck - Bloomberg has its own potentially-incompatible C++ Standard Library implementation. Want to use C++14? Nope, ancient compilers are used to support obsolete architectures. Team specific: * Most of the work is not engaging/interesting and revolves around implementation of business logic with no real algorithmic/performance challenge at all. * You are encourage to make the the code "as simple as possible for new hires". No - hire people who know the language that's being used well, instead. * Working from home is a perk of the company, but I find it very hard to do it without feeling like my manager is upset about it. I wish this was encouraged and easier to schedule as long as people are doing their job. When I'm writing a component I don't need to be in the office - just let me do my work and come to the office when it's beneficial to everyone.

Again, I can only judge it in an engineer's points of views: - Just so-so tech infrastructure among financial companies (not even counting some HFT firms). They use extremely out-of-date infrastructure that many had abandoned in early 2000. The key thing is: software engineering is NOT the money-maker; technical improvement is always secondary to "keep things working as they are because clients need foobar before next week". In fact, even among financial companies, Bloomberg's tech infrastructure is no more than the average. You would be crying once you get into this company and learn what they're still trying to get on-board is something that mainstream has been using since 10 years ago. Seriously, take a look at what’s popular 10 years ago and you’ll know how slow and frightening that Bloomberg moves ahead. - However, compared to regular tech companies (not even to mention the big names), Bloomberg's tech stack is something that engineers may feel shame to talk about at their class re-unions. In fact, this is the most critical thing for young engineers who'd like to keep sharp in tech. To put it in the simplest way: Bloomberg (at its best eng teams) offers great opportunities to make single-cylinder combustion engines. Other tech companies provide engineers with some engines (proprietary and/or open-source) and they end up making rockets and space shuttles. At its regular teams in financial divisions, the tech stack is just... It’s all about the business logic. NO TECH! - No respect to former employees. Bloomberg never hires back former employees as loyalty is a key. So if you left, HR is not likely to take you serious anymore because they know you’re not coming back. This happened to many of my colleagues who left the company. They got poor or even no support from the company for tax, health, immigration and legal needs. Some of them got into troubles because of that. Just sad. - Blame-based performance evaluation system (they'll tell you it's merit-based but nope). Not too many chances/incentives to outperform. - Work/life balance at some teams can be disastrous. - Any fault is recorded. Low tolerance to faults, especially in divisions that make money. - Pays much less than the top tech companies.