18 months in as a software engineer at Bloomberg NYC. going to give you the honest version not the version I'd give at a career fair.
The hours: Depends heavily on team. I know people on terminal-adjacent product teams who are routinely at 7pm or later. My team is more of a 9-6 situation, sometimes earlier on Fridays. Bloomberg culture isn't uniformly brutal, but the expectation that you're present and available is real, especially in your first year. Nobody is going to explicitly tell you to work late. They don't have to.
RTO: As of mid-2026 it's 4 days in-office in NYC. This is a real commitment and they track badge data in some form, though I haven't seen enforcement be aggressive. The commute is the biggest thing nobody talks about. If you're commuting to Midtown from Brooklyn or NJ, that's 2-3 hours a day you're not counting in your WLB calculation.
The people: Actually good. One of Bloomberg's underrated qualities is that the people are sharp and generally not cutthroat. Collaboration is real. The internal systems are byzantine and old in places, but the engineers are solid.
The product access / perks: I have a Terminal. It's genuinely cool for a finance nerd. Not a perk everyone values but it's not nothing.
The not-great stuff: Promotion timelines are slow. Comp progression is okay but not fast. Internal mobility exists but takes time. If you join thinking you'll be a director in three years, you're misreading the culture.
Bottom line for me: it's a stable, smart environment with above-average compensation and above-average in-office expectations. I don't hate it. I'm not evangelical about it. That's probably the honest take.