Software Developer applicants have rated the interview process at Bloomberg with 4 out of 5 (where 5 is the highest level of difficulty) and assessed their interview experience as 100% positive. To compare, the company-average is 54.6% positive. This is according to Glassdoor user ratings.
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I applied through college or university. The process took 4 weeks. I interviewed at Bloomberg (New York, NY)
Interview
The interview process had 3 parts. The first part was a half hour screen with a Bloomberg recruiter with standard "why do you want to work here" and "tell me about your background" type questions.
The recruiter scheduled me for a 45 min technical phone screen that used HackerRank for a code challenge. The code challenge came straight out of Cracking the Code Interview. I did very well during the phone screen so a different recruiter emailed me to schedule an onsite interview. The recruiter asked me if I would prefer to write code on a whiteboard, paper, or on a computer during my onsite, and that I could bring my own laptop. I chose to bring my own laptop, but during the onsite the interviewers had me use HackerRank on one of the Bloomberg computers. There was no terminal for me to run my code to see if it worked or test out ideas (just an FYI).
Bloomberg arranged for me to fly to NYC for the interview and paid for the flight, one night of hotel, and transportation to and from the airport.
The onsite interview consisted of a tour of Bloomberg, and two separate one hour technical interview panels with two engineers per panel. Each of the four engineers asked me to solve a technical question - three were classic computer science algorithms, one was more of a free flowing design/architectural question. Some of the interviewers were trying a little too hard to be helpful with steering me toward the algorithms' solutions and it really interrupted my thought process. One engineer took so long to explain what he wanted me to do that I had almost no time to solve the problem.
I was genuinely disappointed that I did not at any point meet with anyone from management, and that all of my interviewers were engineers with a limited perspective on what makes a great employee. The focus of the interviews was incredibly one-dimensional. All my interviewers seemed to care about was algorithms and data structures.
My suggestions to improve upon this process would be to swap at least one of the five technical interviewers for someone from management who has a different perspective on what makes a great engineer. Ultimately I did OK during the onsite interview, but did not get a job offer. If I could do it over again, I would spent a lot more time on problems from Cracking the Coding Interview and any other algorithms I could get my hands on.
Interview questions [1]
Question 1
Write a function that finds and returns the node with the second highest value in a Binary Search Tree. Assume the BST is valid, but not necessarily complete or balanced.
I applied online. I interviewed at Bloomberg (New York, NY) in Mar 2018
Interview
Firstly introduce yourself, I spent 10 mins on it. Then you were asked to talk about what do you think of Bloomberg and your opinion about this company. Finally technical question part.
Interview questions [1]
Question 1
Give you an array with increasing order and decreasing order [1,2,3,4,2,1], find a target number.
I applied through a recruiter. The process took 1 week. I interviewed at Bloomberg (Princeton, NJ) in May 2018
Interview
A recruiter forwarded me the role. Setup a 60 minute phone and HackerRank assessment. The interviewer introduced himself, I talked about my resume and past positions, then he pasted in one problem (see below). I had to think about it for a few minutes before I thought of a solution. During that time, the interviewer kept interrupting me asking if I had a solution or not. Eventually I did and I coded it out. Then he asked for a few more additional features, which I coded without any hesitation. By then the 60 minutes was almost up, and I asked a few questions about the role and environment there. Seemed to go well except for the impatience right after giving me the technical problem.
Interview questions [3]
Question 1
Write a function to give arbitrary probabilities (totalling 100%) to each face of a six-sided die.