Vantaggi
Used to be job stability, and work life balance. Now neither is a guarantee. Now some orgs are PIP'ing like Amazon without the hazard pay for it.
Svantaggi
- Low pay compared to companies of similar size - You may encounter management *and* "senior" engineers that haven't coded or shipped more than a couple features in 20+ years - Company handrolls everything, choosing to build worse or broken versions of open source tools out of ego instead of business calculations. - Overengineered slop and legacy services abound, many many years past when anyone would expect them to, and adoption of new SOTA tech is delayed 3+ years minimum. - Firm has way too many teams and reorgs for tiny volumes of work, as if they were trying to create as many levels of management as possible. Despite constant claims that Bloomberg's culture and eng org is "flat". - Weird management attitudes that expect cult-like work-family devotion when they're below market for firms of similar size, and are PIP'ping. - No career growth. Everyone with the ability to leave or who enjoys building actual software chooses to so within a few years -- many who stay become nightmare bosses in what is visibly a gerontocracy, not a meritocracy. - The teams with the best culture are usually the most stagnant and worst for your resume/career if you want to ever have another job with a better tech company.