Pros
BGI has always been a good place to work, employing smart, friendly people who are motivated to be all that they can be. A lot of that is due to it being a "west coast" firm, head quartered in San Francisco. Now we've become BlackRock we're an "east coast" firm, head quartered in New York. How will our culture change? My experience on integration so far is that on a person level, we're all much the same, and a lot of the fear we've all had about losing our culture - our "niceness" - is groundless. That said, it does appear decisions are taken at a much higher level at BlackRock than BGI, and it'll be interesting to see if at a corporate level we become more JFDI than consensual....
Cons
We work long hours, but hey, we're in the city so that's par for the course..... We're not great at keeping our employees informed on whats going on. And we've reached a size now where often the left hand doesn't know what the right hand is doing (there are lots of bits of BGI heavily siloed, doing essentially similar things without looking for synergies)