I applied online. I interviewed at Bloomberg (New York, NY) in Dec 2022
Interview
Was given two problems leetcode medium difficulty. Was able to solve first and in the process of solving second was interrupted by interviewer pushing on his solution (was I taking too long?). In the midst of this interviewer told me that the way I approached it by running incomplete code a number of times to test - is a negative sign. I was going to ask if I should stop but proceeded looking to see if interviewer ego will present itself again. Later I learned that Bloomberg evaluates the process of your code writing during these interviews down to variable naming and indentation. It seems like it’s a pattern at Bloomberg to mention significance of their employment (10+ years in the case of my interviewer) and show disinterest to the candidate profile. Interviewer was polite, but the way interview was conducted made me think that if joining Bloomberg means being surrounded by such toxic individuals shaming you on spacing and indentations in your code is something I want to be in.
Interview questions [1]
Question 1
Calculate string length by using a recursion, check is a number sequence is a palindrome.
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