Pros
*Programmers can be smart *OK chance of getting paid well *Nice guest speakers *20 days off *Good geek war stories after you fix something at 2AM in the ancient codebase. *For many groups, no need for an awkward "lame duck" period when you quit. You'll be fired immediately and escorted out by security.
Cons
*Programmers are not valued. BB is a finance company driven by sales. (Usually light) bullying is acceptable by product people and/or sales types towards programmers. *No career path for programmers. Advancement past "senior programmer" is means becoming a manager and becoming non-technical. *Promotions to lead/manager are mainly based on politics. No transparency about promotion process. *Getting a job after BB is hard, as your experience will be with a lot of tech used only at BB (this is slowly getting better). *Reviews are solely the opinion of your manager. No peer reviews. *Questionable future. The terminal is an ATM but its past it's prime and getting nipped on the heels by more and more competitors. BB claims to be investing in other industries, but those groups are barely visible and they hemorrhage programmers. Also, Mike Bloomberg (he's always just "Mike") is in his 70s and there's not any of kind of succession plan nor an obvious future leader. *Alot of cowboy coding, no expectation to document/comment. *The cult of personality is strong, and generally it is dangerous to question leadership. They give you a copy of Bloomberg's book when you start. *It's very hard as a programmer when colleagues leave. Documentation does not happen, and since programmers are sometimes escorted out when they give notice knowledge transfer doesn't happen. This makes for rough problems when a critical system goes down and the primary maintainer quit 2 weeks ago.