Bloomberg Financial Software Engineer interview questions

I got this interview through on campus career fair. They might care about when you graduate. For non cs major, they will first give an online IQ test. For CS major, they give an online technical test in the language you choose. The language test is pretty syntactic. After that, I got a phone interview.

I applied online for the Financial Software Developer position. The job description said the interview process would be a technical test and an in house interview. The next week I received an email asking me to do an online skill assessment. The website is called select2perform, quite similar to brainbench. My test is on Java since I chose Java as my most proficient language in my online application. I got 3.89 out of 5, in the Proficiency Level of Advanced (3.51-4.50). Percentile of global population is 94, and 91 for company population. After three and half weeks, I got a phone call for an on site interview. It consists of three sessions. The first two are mainly technical, with some behavioral questions such as why I want to work for Bloomberg. In the first one, they asked a little bit about my previous projects, some concepts questions, and data structures. Then I was asked to write some code. They said I could do it either iteratively or recursively. I chose to use loop, and they asked about the reason, and what were the potential problems of doing it recursively. In the end, they asked some logic questions, which were not very hard. In the second interview with a couple of senior R&D people, after some general questions, I was asked to write some more code. They asked my idea first, and then pointed out conditions in which the idea wouldn’t work, so I needed to modify it. After they were satisfied with the idea, I wrote the code. Then they asked how I could make sure the code is correct, etc. They did not need you to be perfect in syntax, and you can write pseudo code. The last session was with the HR. Typical behavioral questions, and it was very positive experience. I asked questions about the role, the company and the recruiting process. She said usually a decision would be made quite fast, typically in about three days, and if they were uncertain about a candidate, they might have another phone interview. The next day they called to make an offer and I accepted it.