Bloomberg reviews

4.0

79% would recommend to a friend

(8,226 total reviews)
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Michael R. Bloomberg and Vlad Kliatchko

85% approve of CEO

73% positive business outlook

Bloomberg has an employee rating of 4.0 out of 5 stars, based on 8,226 company reviews on Glassdoor which indicates that most employees have a good working experience there. The Bloomberg employee rating is in line with the average (within 1 standard deviation) for employers within the Informationstechnologie industry (3.9 stars).

Reviews by job title

8K reviews
2.0
May 19, 2018
Recommend
CEO approval
Business Outlook

Pros

It's a widely respected company with a good graduate program, on the job training and (in theory) career improvement. There are free snacks (but not meals, unless you count breakfast at 6AM and dinner after 8PM - I kid you not). The money is good (before tax!) and there are yearly pay reviews which can be generous if you're fortunate enough to have helped the company out in some way (like fix a disastrous outage) or are especially sycophantic.

Cons

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.

2.0
May 15, 2018
Recommend
CEO approval
Business Outlook

Pros

- pay was very competitive - reputable name - free food in the pantry - modern office (London)

Cons

The work is excruciatingly mind-numbing. This is not data analysis, it's data entry. 3 types of candidates are hired for Global Data: 1) finance background - will quickly become bored because you're actually doing such a pigeon-holed task and only feel fulfilled by looking at the news or other parts of the terminal during free time 2) other educational background - these people are hired because of their language skills, which is one of the more important attributes for employees (need to read data points in every country); these people tend to stay the longest because they realise there aren't better-paying jobs elsewhere for their skillset. Other employers in The City are smart enough to know these people don't have transferrable skills from Bloomberg in finance 3) tech educational background - these types of people are increasingly being hired, and unfortunately are given tasks far below their technical capabilities. Suggestions for improvements fall on deaf ears and get muddled in politics. Innovation is led from NYC anyways. Don't be fooled by their pitch about machine learning, cutting edge tech opportunities, etc In the end, complacency will keep a certain % of employees because the pay is quite good, for the work being done. Note on other common entry-positions: While everyone says Global Data > Analytics because of less stressful workflow, at least Analytics has opportunity to move into Sales, where you can feel less like a lemming (and earn more money). A word of caution- you will need to embellish the responsibilities you had while at Bloomberg, once you get fed up enough and decide to interview for opportunities elsewhere.

1.0
Aug 24, 2017
Recommend
CEO approval
Business Outlook

Pros

Great salary for young talent, lots of training during your first few months, brilliant people at lower ranks. Also, if you learn to "play the game", you can avoid the stress and just take the pay!

Cons

There are three roles you carry out in this department: answering clients' questions, calling clients with updates on the software, calling clients to discuss how their needs can be better covered with the Bloomberg terminal. The first role is what takes up most of your time and is what causes most stress, but the others only add to the generally accepted term of "glorified call centre", where we work 9+ hours a day with only the breaks we allow ourselves, as the workload at no moment allows you time to breathe. Your schedule is fixed to the minute and your work is broken down to micro-movements that are monitored with a great variety of statistical measurements, imposed by a management evermore worried to show that they are adding value in some way. You do not rest and are not given time to carry out more value-adding activities during work hours, so do these after work, thus burning out after a few months. Your relationship with management can depend strongly on your performance in regards to your statistics, which do not reflect your efforts and passion to excel. And this can later have a negative impact on yearly salary increments.

Viewing 34 - 36 of 8,226 Reviews

Glassdoor has 10,069 Bloomberg reviews submitted anonymously by Bloomberg employees. Read employee reviews and ratings on Glassdoor to decide if Bloomberg is right for you.