I applied through a staffing agency. The process took 3 weeks. I interviewed at Bloomberg (New York, NY) in Sep 2016
Interview
Was contacted by a recruiting company. 2 rounds of phone interviews for 2 different teams, so total of 4 phone interview. Interviewers were reasonable folks and they get back to you pretty quickly. On-site interview for two teams: one team before lunch and second one after lunch. You talk to two people at a time for technical questions. Then talked to teams manager's manager, then his manager, then HR person. Recruiter told me that if you start talking managers then >90% chance that you get offer. Coming from other tech companies (Google, Facebook), I was very surprised with on-site interview process though.
1) They kick you out of the building during lunch. You have to find your own lunch, pay for it and come back. This is the first time seeing such a ridiculous process. Let somebody accompany the candidate to do "lunch interview" and ask candidates to pay for themselves. It's not about money, it's about respect.
2) Interviews can go as long as they wish (50 minutes or 90 minutes). In between interviews you can wait long time. Basically I waited 20-30 minute between each interview wondering if anybody was coming. They know this and that's why they book you for much longer than actually needed. I was asked to come back at 12:45PM - I came earlier to be sure I'm not late (12:30PM) and I had to wait until 1:30PM in lobby. I felt like they didn't care about my time - their time was more important.
3) ) Surprisingly story: HR person told me to just email my meal receipts. But recruiter refused to reimburse for the meals, because Bloomberg "doesn't cover meals". Weird. NYC definitely has different culture than SF or Seattle.
Interview questions [1]
Question 1
Questions were generally simple, e.g. check if two linked lists intersect.
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