I applied through a recruiter. The process took 4 weeks. I interviewed at Bloomberg (New York, NY) in Oct 2018
Interview
Arbitrary interview criteria depending on team & interviewers. Non-meritocratic.
Telephonic interviews with two different teams followed by onsite interviews with two teams. Interviewers themselves were very varied in their CS skill level as well as interviewing skills. Most interviews were 2:1 which was quite distracting as I did have the other interviewer interrupt & lead in a different direction. Overall, I did quite well but was eventually told that one team had to move fast to fill up the position, while the other team was a misfit.I've interviewed with several companies in the past year and I've found the process at Bloomberg quite arbitrary, confusing & non meritocratic (something which they strive really hard to be).
Terrible communication. Got passed between 3 different recruiters all of whom gave specific dates for updates and blew past them. Descriptions of what would be covered in the interviews are wholly inaccurate (don’t bother reading the PDF they sent to “prep” you, almost none of it came up in any of the 3 interviews I did with them.)
Interviewers themselves were decent but clearly had exact “right” answers they were looking for. What’s the point of a leetcode question where there’s only one way to implement it? What’s the point of a system design interview where you’re having a candidate parse through a complex system that they clearly already know everything about and are just looking for 1-2 EXACT modifications to check off their boxes? Was there even a right answer? I genuinely don’t know what this company was looking for. Waste of time, waste of effort, waste of resources. Avoid, avoid, avoid
Interviewed with two separate teams. Coding rounds. Leet code style question. The interview went on for 1 hr. Waiting for the next steps. The seem to like link lists and arrays