Pros
- Great pay - Great benefits (no-fee health insurance, access to nyc & london museums for free) - 3 month new hire training program is a good opportunity to make some friends
Cons
Everything at bloomberg is legacy. Code runs directly on hardware on machines in the datafarms. Some servers are IBM and solaris, not linux, and don’t even support the c++ compilers from 2011. Most senior devs have been in the company since college and haven’t learned anything new about the world of coding for years. It is tough when your team lead is both a friendly person but also hasn’t heard of basic coding tools, like `curl`. I have friends who entered the company with me just a year or so ago out of college and spend most of their time writing fortran. (If you don’t know what fortran is, and you’re under 40, that’s probably a good thing.) Bloomberg Terminal frontend apps are written in an esoteric javascript framework called Rapid, which is a major headache and won’t help you build skills in any modern frontend framework. Bloomberg is a good first job out of college in that you get a great pay and great benefits and can use that to establish yourself in a new city (probably nyc) and save up some money / pay off loans. But if you care about growing as a developer, and if you will be unhappy in an organization where people aren’t passionate and there are few opportunities to really learn, leave quickly.