Working on Bloomberg Global Customer support was the absolute worst job experience I've ever had in my career. It started feelings I had gotten a dream job, in a dream company with amazing growing prospects and I finished in therapy, taking anxiety pills and hating my life every single day.
BCS, as they call the department, passed through a lot of changes on the past few years, it basically started to take a lot of work that was previously done by other departments, so that caused a lot of dissatisfaction among the people that used to work there for a long time and eventually a mass exodus.
The truth is, BCS management don't know what they are doing, BCS keeps taking more and more work from other departments and salaries don't go up accordingly, rules and procedures change in a weekly basis and people end up very confused.
Micromanagement is a huge problem, employees are strictly controlled from the minute they start until the minute they finish, 2 extra minutes that is taken in the bathroom or commuting in the morning is counted and people are punished for that but, if employees stay stuck in a call with a client for 20 minutes after their shifts, it's considered “part of the business" and people can’t ask that time back.
On the interview it was never mentioned that it was mandatory to work on weekends at least once a month, otherwise I would have not taken the position.
Holidays are taken by scale and no more than 15 people can be on holidays at the same time, which makes an absolute nightmare to take some days off, especially during the summer and Christmas. I can't count how many times I had to cancel or miss holidays with family and friends because of that. Again, it was never mentioned on the interview otherwise that would be a deal breaker for me.
Most of people in the department only put up with being in that fancy call centre because they know it's a start to go somewhere higher up in the company but, people don't progress unless they are popular and do a lot of socialising around. The idea of progressing someone because the person deserves it or worked hard for it doesn't exist in BCS, if the person doesn't socialise, they won't go anywhere.
Overall, a vey negative environment to work in, most people are unhappy there just waiting for the first opportunity to leave the department or to leave the company. I’ve seen so many people developing depression and anxiety on this role including me, people taking long sick leaves and eventually leaving the company a few weeks after they’re back to work because they just could not handle suck a toxic workplace.
I do believe Bloomberg is a good company to work for, but BCS seemed to be a big messy negative call centre full of people feeling miserable and waiting for the first opportunity to find better horizons.
