I applied through a recruiter. The process took 2 weeks. I interviewed at Bloomberg (New York, NY) in Mar 2015
Interview
Very professional, thorough, precise. Hackerrank screening (1 hr) followed by in person at their office. 4 rounds of in-person interview - each 1 hr. Beautiful office. I was contacted by a recruiter. Process moves very fast. You need to decide your own pace (when to take an interview)
Interview questions [1]
Question 1
Deep fundamentals, nothing facy. You need to have a rock solid practice on data structures. Think, eat, breath data structures and be ready to apply logic. honestly, no one will benefit from knowing past questions when it comes to Bloomberg interviews. Fundamental questions on Trees, queues, algorithms, data structures. That is all you need to crack. Practice a lot on hackerrank and such sites.
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