A great place to build your skills – if you ever get out of the meetings.
Pros
The fabulous office space and free food get a lot of press, but the best part of working at Bloomberg LP is your coworkers. With very few exceptions, BBG makes a practice of hiring some of the smartest, most ambitious, and most capable people in the job market. This isn't a teaching hospital – if you're there, you're there because BBG thinks that you're more than capable of taking charge of your area and crushing it with little direction from higher-ups. That implied trust in your professionalism and capability means a lot.
Cons
Hesitating to call work-life balance a joke at Bloomberg, but only because it's not funny how terrible it is. Of the four weeks of vacation you're given, expect to take about half of that, if you're lucky – and if you don't answer e-mails while you're gone, be prepared to hear about it when you get back. Every action at this company – in the News division, those are few and far between – is preceded by approximately 50 meetings wherein the same talking points are hashed out by the same people without any results. In the News division, expect to make 50-60 percent what you would at a competing venture for twice the work. For lower level positions in particular, the attrition rate is astonishingly high – I was the fourth person to hold my position and leave after less than a year. Like my three predecessors, I burned out from the unreasonably workload – we're talking sleeping at desks – combined with an outrageously undermarket salary.