I applied online. I interviewed at Bloomberg (New York, NY) in Apr 2018
Interview
- short call from HR
- technical phone interview
- onsite technical interviews (1/2 day)
- a few follow up interviews with other teams / stakeholders
In general, they weren't trying to trick me up. They really wanted to ask me about things that I already understood, not try to find things I didn't know. And they want you to feel comfortable so they can see your best, they aren't trying to embarrass you or make you feel dumb. It was a very positive experience
Interview questions [1]
Question 1
about search algorithms and benefits/costs of one vs another
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