PDC (EN) : Bloomberg
Internship London > Culture > Bloomberg (presentation)
Poland, Spain, UK, France: the Interns 2007 team is a mix of a lot of different cultural influences, making this internship more and more international. Or how to discover a lot of countries in only one trip !
The first days of this internship have mostly been composed of lectures and presentations – yeah, lectures, like the ones given in our preferred university – to know everything about Bloomberg, at a technical and human point of view.
For the human part, the firm preens itself on* having less hierarchical stratums than any other company. If everyone indeed has a manager / mentor, up to the big-boss in the US, the stratums are flattened** by several ingenious ideas :
- The use of the first names (given names) is compulsory : you can’t call someone using a last name. On the badges the staff has to wear all the time, the first name is set in bold type, the rest in only here for security-reasons.
- The teamwork with a teamleader, giving directions. There is no one to debrief to, there is just work to do.
- The open-spaces with two to three hundred persons, where each member, independently to his salary or position, has the same privileges and equipment.
- The meritocracy, where the merit and the devotion take precedent on the age and seniority.
- The premises***, from the Kitchen (open-space with free stuff to eat and drink, from breakfast to the last break of the day), to the walls made of transparent glass, just like the transparency of the society.
- And so on…
The firm, principally working in communication, has been able to illustrate its skills inside the company, what’s another good point !
For the technical stuff, we first have to speak about their principal product: the Bloomberg terminals. With them, people can follow the economic evolutions, with real-time news (directly from the press agencies), real-time status of the stock exchanges (and not half an hour late), economical surveys, etc. This terminal is our principal tool, and is permanently corrected, or modified. Bloomberg is leading the market of the economic analysis because of the quality of this product, and that’s just our job : do a clean work, readable, efficient, and correct the bugs as they are discovered.
And starting tomorrow, our first contact with the teams, and perhaps real work to do.
Important information: please note that in agreement with the confidentiality obligation of the firm, no information about the technical functionalities, or information available through the Bloomberg system, will be published here. Every piece of information you’ll find in these lines, is either public ( example of this post), or not in conflict with this obligation.
*
preen oneself on : se targuer de
**
flattened : aplanies
***
premises : locaux
[ Article traduit du français ]
