I applied through a recruiter. The process took 2 weeks. I interviewed at Bloomberg (New York, NY) in Sep 2012
Interview
There were two phone screens. One of them was by a panel of people most of which were not technical people trying to gauge my technical abilities. After about a week I was invited onsite. The onsite interview was about half a day and I met primarily with different layers of management as well as internal recruiting. The onsite interview lasted about half a day.
Interview questions [1]
Question 1
Mostly some basic networking type questions relating to C programming and TCP protocol specifics - how connections are created and torn down.
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