The work is incredibly tedious and unfulfilling, few people here are passionate about what they do, management is for the most part underqualified and unenthusiastic about change, and daily work is mired in laughably outdated software and workflow tools that are incredibly frustrating to use and in many cases have not been updated since the 90s.
To top it all off, you're in central New Jersey with slim prospects of moving to another Bloomberg office within 18 months, which leads to high attrition rates and low morale among young employees and a collective sense that this is a place where careers go to die, and should be used temporarily as a stepping stone while you study for the CFA. People jokingly call 'Global Data' 'Global Data Entry', and this name fits.
Yes, data processing may be inherently tedious work, however that is greatly exacerbated when the department has collectively shrugged its shoulders at any legitimate efforts to utilize the widespread advances in technology and data processing automation of the last 15 years, instead relying on questionable and incredibly outdated tools and processes (literally, in many cases these ave not been updated at all since the 1990s). Management talks the talk of leveraging technology (OMG the crowd! codecademy!), but in most cases these solutions are far too little too late and are further hurt by a lack of any legitimate R&D support. Analysts with little to no technical background (who are further surrounded by older employees with no desire for change) can only do so much.
Compared with the glamorous Bloomberg offices in NYC and the rest of the world as well as the incredible funding we pour into the (money-hemorrhaging) news department, the Skillman office feels like the forgotten stepchild of the Bloomberg corporate family.
