I applied through an employee referral. I interviewed at Bloomberg in Sep 2019
Interview
Referred by a friend. Took about 1.5 months from application to offer and a total of about 8 rounds.
Had an initial call with the recruiter regarding the role, fit etc. This was followed by 2 phone interviews which were both coding + discussion, 1 hour each.
Then had an onsite in a few weeks. The first round was high level design + role specific questions. The second round was coding + low level design. Next 2 rounds were straightforward, one with an engineering manager and another with the HR. After the onsites, they scheduled 2 additional interviews with senior members of the team, both of them focused on past experiences, high level engineering and overall role + culture fit.
Got an offer within 3 days. Overall, I loved the interview process because what I realised was communication and collaboration skills mattered far more than mindlessly pumping out code. The interviews are geared towards checking these skills which I really appreciate.
Interviewers and HR were friendly. Overall, the process was extremely professional with minor to no hiccups.
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