I applied through a recruiter. The process took 3 weeks. I interviewed at Bloomberg (New York, NY) in May 2015
Interview
Two separate phone interviews, each lasting about an hour and conducted using a pair coding website. This was followed by an onsite interview with two technical sessions, and a meeting with an HR person.
Bloomberg conducts technical interviews 2 on 1, and have a lot of interruptions. It was surprisingly adversarial compared to interviews I've done at other big tech companies: Google, Microsoft, Facebook, and some smaller companies. The other rather irksome aspect is that they expect coding questions to be solved on small pieces of paper, half the size of the standard 8.5x11. They also asked brain teaser questions, which is generally proven to be a waste of time. Overall, just lots of annoying aspects.
The younger engineers in the first interview where nice but still interrupted too much, while the senior guys in the second interview very dismissive. The HR person was quite nice. 2 on 1 technical interviews are awful.
Interview questions [1]
Question 1
Brain teaser, where you have people crossing a bridge in pairs with a flashlight in the dark where they walk at different speeds and you have to optimize the speed.
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