I applied online. The process took 3 weeks. I interviewed at Bloomberg (New York, NY) in Jul 2020
Interview
45 Phone Technical Interview session was setup on Hacker Rank followed by HR phone screening. First 10-15 min introduction talking with interviewer and then, followed by 30 min coding session to solve the problem in Hacker Rank. Please watch time on introduction session, it is better to use more time for problem solving. Problem solving time was too short.
Interview questions [1]
Question 1
Solve the problem in HackerRank code live.
10-15 min introduction with interviewer and 30 min to solve the problem. Problem was CandyCrush problem, to write program such that for given string, if three or more repeating adjacent alphabets can be removed.
Initially, I was solving this without recursion approach, it got mess up after removing the substring of repeating string, then, when returned, it may be have again the repeating strings like "abbbaac" => "aaac" = "c".
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