Bloomberg Sr Software Engineer interview questions

I had two telephonic interviews. First one is with Carlos and second one is with Piyush. The first one is very good, he asked me about basic C++ questions, V-tables, polymorphism, multithreaded issues, deadlock etc. He also asked me to design an algorithm to find the big number in a stack without doing a full search and to store some data so that user can search with for a specific city and for a range of values. I proposed him a hash table for map and he was satisfied. However, my second interview did not go very well. The person on other end was very bookish. He does not like answers from general principle, always wants the answers as written in the book. For example, he asked me what a pure virtual function is. My answer was that a virtual function which does not has an implementation. He said that it is not you have to write function and assign it to zero. Does not it mean the same thing? After that he asked me about the advantages and disadvantages of multi threading application, I gave hive two three points in both side, but looks like he is looking for something else, always interrupt my answer with “what else”. He asked me to design a smart pointer class. I did not do very well on it as I was mixing the idea of a com object with smart pointer and introduced the add ref and release logic to it. I know that I was bit confused at the time. Then he asked me to design an algorithm to find group of two numbers, from an unlisted array of numbers, whose sum is 11. I did one with NXN complex. He asked me if I can do with N complexity. I told him that without any additional memory I will not be able to design it right now, but I have to think about it. The interview last for 48 min and he told me that HR people will let me know. Just in one hour I got an e-mail from HR saying that they cannot continue my candidacy. Beware of the guy and answer the question exactly as it is written in book.

I had interview with them at least 10 to 12 times over the years and they are the worst ones to interview with. They as all these low level compiler questions and if you answer one question right they dig deeper into how the compiler works and all the features of the Language usually C++. Most all this information is just rote academic knowledge which has very little commercial value but they expect you to know it. The last interview the some of the questions did not make any sense and when I looked them up it confirmed that he did not know what he was asking. I would forget talking to Bloomberg. I is a wast of time and if you get past the telephone interview and they bring you in then will ask more of these rote knowledge questions of you. They hire very few people and I was almost never impressed with talking to the people who did the interviewing. They did not seem to have a clue about the applications they are working on and could not follow anything when I described what I had done in the past to design systems that did similar thing to what they were suppose to be working on. The place is also filled with almost all H-1Bs so most Americans will not have a chance of getting in there.