Bloomberg reviews

4.0

79% would recommend to a friend

(8,238 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 8,238 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 Information Technology industry (3.9 stars).

Reviews by job title

8K reviews
3.0
Oct 1, 2018
Recommend
CEO approval
Business Outlook

Pros

I will try to be as honest as possible - some of the pros are this is a really good place to start your career, especially if you want to make the jump to one of the big banks in a year or 2. Really good benefits as well - good base, free food, insurance fully covered and probably the best 401k match you will find out there(7.5%). New batch of kids out of college every few months start and all of global data is all young kids who end up becoming your good friends since there is nothing to do in the area. You can your time here to try to build up your tech skills or study for the CFA. Take the offer if you have contacts already in Global data that can honestly tell you about the team that the company want to place you in - it's a complete hit or miss and you want to make sure you don't get stuck for 18 months on a useless team wasting your time.

Cons

I mentioned they bring in a fresh batch of kids in every few months - There's a reason for that. The turnover is incredibly high and the reasons for these have been stated lengthily in the other reviews. Probably about 75% of the data teams are complete BS. Most of your job will be manually tagging data day in and day out cranking out work items. Then you will be assigned a block of time where you have to do troubleshooting for clients and their questions. Nobody can escape this, everyone who is an analyst has to do this. It can be manageable if you are on a big team where you might be assigned to do this once a week for a few hours to doing it multiple hours a day. The actual "data analysis" works probably comprises of a small part of your day unless you are an extremely motivated individual who stays in the office for an extra 10 hours a week to do these projects on your own. It is crucial that you find contacts within global data that can give you an honest picture of the data team that you get the offer for. There are some very good teams that are working on exciting projects under talented managers and if you get onto those teams then this should be an auto accept. One of the other things is that it is an unfortunate cycle where the talented folks quickly learn that they either got stiffed by a bad team/manager, or reached a professional/educational growth ceiling in their role. Since the management structure is extremely flat, these folks leave within 1-3 years. Because of this, the middle of the road analysts stay and end up becoming horrible managers. There are of course some amazing managers, but this is the exception not the rule.

1.0
Apr 14, 2016

I agree with the person who called it 'Dystopia'

Anonymous employee
Recommend
CEO approval
Business Outlook

Pros

The hours are not bad at all, working 8-5 or less depending on your team. When at work, it is very easy to only actually do roughly 3 hours of work per day and spend the rest browsing the news (as a shockingly large number of people do), or working on your resume & linkedin, or writing scathing glassdoor reviews. 401K and all benefits are great. There are some really great people here as well, it's just that most of them will be out the door sooner or later for a better opportunity.

Cons

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.

1.0
Jan 19, 2015

Don't bother

Recommend
CEO approval
Business Outlook

Pros

Free food, which is not all that great. Monopoly position in its market helps allow for massive wastage of resources (see below).

Cons

Innumerable. Huge bureaucracy, ritualistic cult-like atmosphere, bizarre big-brother monitoring everywhere. Does everyone really need to know where and when you badged in and out? Entire teams that do little to nothing. Regular need to tell managers to pi** off when they attempt to bully you. Mind-numbingly boring work. Early 1980's technology hasn't changed a bit. And lastly, now that the owner has returned, having exhausted his political adventure, it is like Odysseus returning to Ithaca and there will be major lettings go, new joiners first.

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