I applied online. The process took 1+ week. I interviewed at Bloomberg (Londres, Angleterre) in Nov 2022
Interview
Initial phone screen with HR. Asked standard questions about resume and the classic 'Why Bloomberg'.
Phone screen round consisted of a single interviewer. Asked a bit about resume and work. Had 40-45 minutes to solve a single question (verified with interviewer about how many questions does he expect me to solve)
Question was standard LC hard, right off of LC, tagged under Bloomberg. Solved it with 1D DP (dynamic programming) approach. 10 mins was questions about the team. A week later I get a reject.
Read LC discuss. Sometimes I think Bloomberg just screens international candidates without any concrete plan of sending them forward in the pipeline. Super random to get through. I've heard of friends who've not been able to do a bfs/dfs problem and have gone through to virtual on site. Do NOT give Bloomberg with the hopes that you'll get selected.
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