Stay away from Bloomberg - Anonymous employee Bloomberg Employee Review

Everything about the actual job in this company is bad. Even though I am writing about the Data department, it is true for the whole company. 1) Misleading job advert – they market roles at Bloomberg using fake titles, like ‘Global Data Analyst’, ‘Financial Product Sales and Analytics’, which sound nice, but the jobs you actually do for the first title is literally data entry + customer service, for the second title it is entirely customer service (you are the person on the other end of HELP HELP key). Roles should instead be called ‘Data entry specialist’ and ‘Call center representative’. 2) Incredibly dull, repetitive and unstimulating job. This is the most non-serious job I have ever had since handing out leaflets in high school. 70% of the work day revolved around routing clients’ questions, asked via HELP HELP function (aka ‘tickets’) to different teams depending on the content of the question. Many times the split of the departments into teams did not make any sense, and you were essentially paid for learning the peculiarities of such a division. My fellow colleagues were answering these questions and manually entering the data into the terminal. The next day the whole procedure is repeated. 30% are left for ‘projects’, which are usually interesting and you have incredibly high degree of freedom as team leaders and managers (the bottom 2 layers of hierarchy) do not have a clue about anything. The job can be done without any degree, yet most of the people there have good masters due to selective application process. 3) Big brother atmosphere/micromanagement. Bloomberg does not trust its employees at any levels. All the decisions are made in the US. Other offices sometimes even get notified of these decisions late, let alone being allowed to take part in the decision making process. The company also monitors and tries to monitor every single aspect of your day, and that sometimes reaches grotesque forms. Examples are timing your time taking tickets, publicly displaying the time you badged in on your profile, being told off when you come in at 8:01, getting emails & messages from your managers when you spend ‘too much’ time in the bathroom (applicable to Analytics department). You will most likely have a timetable, where every hour of your day, including lunch, will be strictly scheduled, and doing/not doing what you are assigned is tracked using a variety of statistical measures. Other reviews mention microphones and reading your emails, I don’t have any proof of that, but would not be very surprised to find that out. 4) Incompetent TLs and managers. Because of all the above, there is significant brain drain from the department and the company in general. The smartest colleagues tend to leave very quickly realizing how bad it is. The ones who can’t leave usually stay and become team leaders, thus promoting adverse selection to management roles. As a result of this, there is no real leadership in the company, your TL will likely be less intelligent than you, knowing nothing about the subject, and his/her only competency will be monitoring your metrics and alerting you when you are 1 minute late from lunch/took too many minutes in the toilet. As you usually reach TL level after 4-5 years within the company, these people realise they are not employable anywhere else due to the nature of their skill set and hence become extremely risk averse and will do anything to maintain the status quo and save their job, stifling all the innovation. You will hear phrases like ‘Go ahead only if this doesn’t change much’ a lot. Team Leaders who are not performing well in one team, will be laterally moved to another team, so team leaders in lets say Fixed Income team can come from HR, studying HR at a random university. 5) No career path/no exit opportunities. If you are looking to move internally – the company actually encourages this, but all the roles in data are more or less the same, so you would not avoid manual data entry and customer service, thus being stuck doing absolutely unskilled tasks. Only exceptions are data science teams, which also do not do anything outstanding, but at least do not have this entry and customer service parts. But because everyone wants to move there, you may need to wait 3+ years just to make a lateral move to an entry-level position without any salary increase. If you are looking outside, the common exit opportunities are back office jobs or other data providers, where you do more or less the same job. You will have to embellish your responsibilities at Bloomberg during your interviews if you do not want to look like a waiter applying for finance jobs. 6) Absolutely not working incentive scheme. Bloomberg has a very strange culture where everyone receives roughly the same salary and where everyone receives roughly same raises every year, no matter how well you perform. If you are a top performer, your bonus will likely be literally 0-£200 higher than the bad performer and the raise you get will be just £1000 per year more. This creates no incentives to work beyond the stipulated time/work hard or work smart. You will get the same in the end. 7) Promotions based on connections. In many times, the promotions are actually decided based on how people like you instead of how good you are or how suitable your skill set is.