I applied through a staffing agency. The process took 2 weeks. I interviewed at Bloomberg in Apr 2018
Interview
Was reached out by a recruiting company regarding an opening with Bloomberg. Since it was through a recruiting company they were able to pass my resume to the team and then decided on a Date/Time for a phone screen interview.
I personally felt they interviewer was very rude and arrogant. More than once, he tried cut me and was not ready to hear what I had to say. Twice I wanted to take a different approach and he said not to do that. I get it that he might be wanting to check my coding skills. After I coded he got back to me saying that, earlier you were discussing something about HashMap. Now you can describe it.
I knew I was not going to pass this within 15 minutes because he was not ready to listen to an explanation. IMO, An algorithm can be implemented with multiple time complexities. The end goal is to optimize it to the best possible time complexity. When I tried to explain the interviewer was not ready to listen what I was trying to say. Why I choose one data structure over another.
Interview lasted for around 50 minutes. In the last 3 minutes, he asked that if I had any questions for him. I asked a few about the team and work he does. He mentioned that he owned a part of the code. I guess, arrogance come with position and money.
The only reason I call this interviewing process to be negative is the way the interviewer behaved. IMO, there is no need to pull ranks on interviewees. In an interview, it is the interviewee who should share his ideas and describe successfully why he chose that solution or not. If the interviewer cannot put the interviewee at easy, then it is OK, but at least don't raise your voice.
P. S. There are multiple websites where candidates discuss interview questions. I checked. My answers were to the point. I also described the solution and time complexity (twice), but the interviewer kept telling me I was wrong and assume that it is what he says.
Interview questions [1]
Question 1
Basically the question was to display browser history in reverse order.
So if the order of website is bloomberg.com, bbc.com, cnn.com, bbc.com, then the display order should be:
bbc.com, cnn.com, bloomberg.com
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