I applied through a recruiter. The process took 2 weeks. I interviewed at Bloomberg (New York, NY) in May 2009
Interview
- Gave my resume to a recruiter. He called me back after couple of weeks saying I needed to take an only C/C++ proficiency test.
- Did the Skill test over the internet (C/C++)
- few days later, did phone interview over one hour
- few days later, full day on site interviews. About 6 or 8 interviews with higher and higher level managers. Around 8 hours.
- Last interview was with HR, who provided me with an offer
Interview questions [1]
Question 1
Writing code on papers. This is not as easy as it sounds if you are not used to it.
One unexpected question that I remember, was:
I do grep on a large file local file and it a long time. I do it again and now it takes much faster. Provide an explanation of this behavior.
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