I applied through a recruiter. The process took 2 months. I interviewed at Bloomberg (New York, NY) in Jul 2020
Interview
The first round was a technical phone screen in a shared coding environment on hacker rank. It involved two leetcode easy problems: determine if two BSTs are equal and calculate how much tax a person would need to pay for the year. It went well and I got along with the interviewer so I was scheduled for a virtual onsite which I was told could take up to half the day if I do well on the technical portion.
Before the interview I had a call with the recruiter where he gave me a very high level break down of what to expect and some tips. Bloomberg likes to keep things flexible so they can move interviewers around if needed so he couldn't give me any detailed information like what I would be tested on or who would be interviewing me. This ended up working against me because from other glassdoor reviews for this role (as well as other technical interviews in general), it seemed I would be getting leetcode style algorithm questions in the technical portion and potentially a system design question in the non-technical portion. So I focused the majority of my time practicing algorithms and brushing up a bit on system design only to be given two questions which were a hybrid of design and coding. I was unprepared but I worked through the first round. Then in the second, my nerves got the best of me and I froze up on a trivial detail. After I got through it, one of the two interviewers cut the interview short and I got the impression he felt this was a waste of his time.
From my conversation with the recruiter I knew if I didn't do well in the technical portion the day would get cut short so I was glad to meet another engineer in the third round but it quickly became clear he was just talking to me as a courtesy as he didn't present a problem and simply asked if I had questions about Bloomberg. To be fair, asking him questions and hearing about his experience at the company was useful and made me interested in the company but he was also candid about the downsides which I appreciated. After two business days I received the rejection email and I haven't heard from the main recruiter I had been in contact with since.
Design and implement a way to split payments across a collection of bonds which had balances. The split is determined by payment rules such as prorata or sequential and rules could be nested in one another.
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