Pros
1. Abundance of resources and in-house expertise 2. Second to none in-house training. I strongly recommend Bloomberg to non finance majors looking to jump start their career in the financial services industry. 3. Great place to pick up sales and customer service skills. 4. Excellent client exposure and networking opportunities. Bloomberg's relationship managers can get meetings with almost every large company in the financial industry. 5. For retiring traders, Bloomberg offers interesting work for professionals to work as applications specialists. 6. Job security. Bloomberg seldom lays off or fires underperformers 7. Decent bonuses tied to overall terminal revenue for all employees 8. Staff are generally nice. There are a few good managers to learn from. 9. Great perks, including more than adequate travel policies, our famous pantry, and health benefits. Michael Bloomberg strikes the right balance between treating staff well and encouraging employees to spend lavishly viz-à-viz Wall Street. Kid friendly Bloomberg parties are the best! 10. Very efficient and helpful HR staff. Has one of the best human resource departments in the industry.
Cons
1. Insufficient performance incentives. There is little or no recourse for underperforming, and little reward for doing well. This is one of the reasons top talent and the best salespeople eventually leave. 2. Middle management quality is mediocre. Whilst there are a few good men and women here, a massive layer of middle managers who lack management skills and industry expertise are running the show (see cons #1). This is not the place to learn management best practice. 3. Compromised customer focus. Sales reps are bogged down by admin work half the time, leaving the other half to serve customers. A "don't rock the boat" culture can be source of frustration when required product enhancements and individual incompetence are swept under the carpet. 4. Frequent re-organizations and reporting line changes (every six months?!). With that much uncertainty in your job scope, not only are job titles and descriptions meaningless, career planning is meaningless when the link between job size and job performance is frequently broken. Frequent change of reporting lines comes at a cost to teamwork and staff loyalty. 5. Weak communication and co-ordination. For sales and product development staff, integrating data and functionality from multiple Bloomberg sources and getting staff from other departments who do not have shared incentives to move in unison pose challenges to their objectives. For support staff, having inadequate warnings about product gaps and project delays means unproductive time wasted on managing client expectations. To be fair, Bloomberg’s C-level management is aware of the high turnover of top employees and is trying to find out why. HR is trying to address this issue with the recent launch of career development initiatives. Unfortunately, there is little HR can do for mid-career professionals without a sincere buy-in from middle management to change the status quo (see above), since the 'management in cahoots' below the top holds the reins to the individuals' career progression anyhow.