As we are well over a year into the pandemic now and pretty much at the end, I find myself saying some form of the following sentence more and more these days: “I can’t tell if it feels like that event happened forever ago, or just yesterday”. It feels like this strange phenomenon where everything that has happened since early March 2020 has been in some weird time vaccuum, and my brain is really struggling to make sense of it.
What complicates my perception of time even further is the fact that I was really just starting my first full time job as this all went down. This means that the first summer that I wasn’t going to have a summer break in any form was also one where I was facing the realities of a global pandemic and WFH on a team I was only on for 4 months for a company I was only at for 6 months. I am left to wonder, is this odd perception of the passing of time a product of the pandemic, or just what it’s like to have the regimented semester/summer/semester structure taken away from you. I imagine the answer is likely some combo of the two.
Anyway, all of this is to say that I am feeling reflective on the last year in large part because I have decided to leave my role at Bloomberg to join Square. My first day at Bloomberg was July 15, 2019. My last day was April 16, 2021. I’m calling that 1.75 years. I wanted to take this time to write up some thoughts on my experience there, and the lessons I’ll be taking forward with me.
I’d be remiss if I didn’t start this by stating how grateful I was for my time at Bloomberg, so I want to start this reflection with what I think Bloomberg does/did well. I had frustrations, which I’ll get to in a minute, but I was gainfully employed for the entirety of a global pandemic, and never feared for my job safety once. Even for software engineers, a privileged group of people, that is an exceptional level of privilege. So let me first express my gratitude, and list what I remember fondly:
One of the reasons I took the Bloomberg offer coming out of college was the training program, and it was a wonderful experience. I learned a lot and made good friends in the city that I hope will continue to be good friends. Additionally, I felt like the program seriously helped the rocky transition into the full time world of work. The transition of student to full-time worker is rough, and a formal training program to meet new people and allow for some time to onboard like Bloomberg has is HUGE for making this easier. I can’t understate how valuable I found those 2 months and how much I encourage every company to have something similar for their new grads.
I got to work on philanthropy engineering as my full time job for over a year, which I still have to pinch myself sometimes to think about how lucky that was for me. I graduated college wondering how I could possibly find an intersection of my interests, and this team was a really good answer for that. It also helped me realize that philanthropy was not the answer for everything, and that non-profits should seriously consider if what they’re doing serves as a valuable replacement for the public sector, or if the money would be better spent pressuring the public sector to take on the work directly.
We were given a stipend to help make the transition to WFH easier, and there were initially attempts to make virtual team building stronger in the form of virtual happy hours and such. The transition was rough, but in the beginning it did feel like we were supported.
In a world where people I know constantly complain about the intelligence and work ethic of their colleagues, I never worked with anyone that I thought was lazy or dumb. In fact, I worked with many who awed me with their intelligence, and whose work ethic put me to shame. Specifically, I met many engineers that didn’t have a 4 year degree in Computer Science, and without fail they were the most hardworking and empathetic people I worked with. I have tons of respect for them for restarting their careers and Bloomberg for giving them a chance.
I would also say that one thing I appreciate about “Bloomberg intelligence” compared to my experience as an intern with “Google intelligence” is the humility. Bloomberg did not feel like a cutthroat rat race in the same way that Google sometimes did, and it was refreshing that it felt recognized that a part of being a great engineer is your ability to neatly explain your ideas to others.
The intern puzzle hunt is truly one of the greatest ideas I’ve ever seen at a company, and I loved participating in it. For those who don’t know, every summer the engineering interns of Bloomberg get to gather for an all-night puzzle solving session, and Bloomberg employees volunteer to make all the puzzles. I was able to be involved with two years of the puzzle hunt and it was some of the most fun work I got to do. I’d still like to do some more thorough write-ups some day on the design of the puzzles I created for the hunt. Unusual perks like this made me so happy, and will be something that I look for in all my future roles.
I’m sure I’m missing many things, but the point is I largely loved my time at Bloomberg. But as I said I am leaving, and I do have some complaints:
First, the reason I am leaving is largely because of the refusal to acknowledge the future of WFH at the company. I found myself with a new home in Phoenix in January, wondering what the future held for me. Any attempt at finding out more was met at all levels of management with “none of us know”, and the sense that Mike Bloomberg would one day just decide we needed to be back and we would all be left scrambling to find accommodations to come back to NYC. I can’t even begin to describe how tedious and annoying it is to try and make life plans around the whims of an 80-something year old man who you’ve never even met. The communication from senior management was really weak throughout all of Covid, and they really need to bring in some younger, more modern voices to that decision making process.
As I said, I think the Covid response overall started strong, with an early WFH mandate and the stipend, but it really fizzled in efficacy quickly. Other than the stipend, I struggle to point to concrete things done to help employees. For me, I get a lot of value out of in person interactions and things like coffee chats. The pandemic yanked those away, and virtual happy hours (which happened intermittently at most as time went on) can’t hold a candle. Especially given that most members of the teams I was on had their own families, I found it really hard to feel connected to the team and company at all. Furthermore, the stereotype that engineers are introverted meant that the default was to log in, do your work, and log out. I was trapped in my Queens apartment with this, and felt my sanity slipping by the day. It was only returning to my family in Phoenix to work from there that I was able to find something remotely sustainable.
I started the pandemic with philanthropy engineering, but after ~7 months felt like I lost the connection and needed a new challenge. As a result I switched to the consumer mobile team, but this ended up being even worse in the social-connection-factor, as that team had just as little virtual connection, and with them I didn’t have the pre-pandemic socializing to fall back on. By the end, it felt like my only choice was to leave the company for a new team and culture entirely.
Outside of covid, I think Bloomberg faces tough challenges in terms of software developer satisfaction given that both the terminal and company are so old by technology standards. Developing for the Bloomberg terminal got better while I was there through the migration away from RDE(a custom Bloomberg technology) and into things like VS Code integration, but the fact remains that it just feels clunky to use the terminal. This is super annoying, because the accepted knowledge is that finance professionals actually -like- the clunkiness as it makes them feel better at their jobs, so as a developer you purposely neuter your product to appease some Wall Street execs who learned the tech back in the 90s and don't want to learn anything new. In my mind this is a terrible foundation to rest most of your business on, and it’s made even worse when you force internal employees to use those same platforms to do their own work as well. Even the use of BUnits as compared to things like YubiKeys is bothersome, and for me this sense of only ever using tech built by Bloomberg got tiresome. Can I please stop using MSG for my email and just use something like gmail or outlook? Why not Google Calendar instead of APPT? My brain is full of 4-letter terminal functions that have no reason existing in the 21st century. I think the trend is slightly positive here, with highlights being the company-wide migration to Python/Linux and investigations into React and WebAssembly in the terminal, but not nearly fast enough for how the rest of technology companies are moving.
Finally, it felt to me that there was a bit of an identity crisis between the younger and older generations of employees at the company. Bloomberg is rather unique in that few tech companies are old enough to have 30+ year tenured employees working there who have immense institutional knowledge to fall back on. However, many of the under-35 cohort seems to resent the older developers for not wanting to pick up every instance of the newest tech, where the older group seems to resent the constant change and just wants to stay with what has worked for the company so far. Both have valid reasons. The problem here, in my mind, is the disconnect between the two. It’s made worse because of a real lack of leadership in the company. While Mike is the official head, he seems to have nothing to do with the day to day and instead the management committee hands out all important decisions. It’s not an exaggeration to say that I received more “Mike for President 2020” buttons than I did meaningful communications from him about the direction of the company. This leads to the feeling that you’re working for a faceless, nameless conglomerate that doesn’t care about you or your growth, and will exist exactly the same whether or not you help out.
I’ll wrap this up by again saying that more than anything, I feel grateful for such an amazing first job out of college. I sometimes think back to Steven in July of 2019 as he is about to start this new chapter. Fresh out of a break-up, coming off of a goodbye-to-freedom backpacking trip around Iceland, scared of his first real move away from his hometown ever, and full of imposter syndrome that there is no way he is qualified for this new job, I’d love to go back and tell him that everything is going to be better than he can even imagine. Bloomberg is great, NYC is great, and, most importantly, you are great.