I applied online. The process took 2 weeks. I interviewed at Bloomberg (New York, NY)
Interview
I was initially contacted by a Bloomberg recruiter via LinkedIn. I was advised to apply for jobs online. I was then contacted to provide dates for phone screen interviews. For two of the positions, I was asked to give dates for in-house interviews. For one position, the interviewers were mostly very young and impatient. I think they had too many interviews going on that day and had a shortage of conference rooms. I was not always given a chance to refine my answers. For the second position I had a much better set of interviews that lasted most of the day (including lunch).
In the end I did not get hired.
Interview questions [1]
Question 1
I mentioned using a circular buffer as a technique of buffering messages and they asked me to implement one. I had not thought out how to deal with telling the difference between buffer full end buffer empty.
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