I applied through a staffing agency. The process took 1 day. I interviewed at Bloomberg (New York, NY) in Feb 2009
Interview
I got the opportunity through a staffing firm. The interview consists of 3 sections, each section takes approximately 1 hour:
1. Met with two senior engineers. Technical questions related to C++, data structures and algorithms
2. Met with hiring manager and another senior engineer. Technical questions and introduction to the job
3. Met with senior manager. Questions about my past experience and technical questions
In all the sections I was asked to write code on paper to solve small algorithm problems. It's very important to be able to write high quality code.
I received the offer 2 days after the interview.
Interview questions [2]
Question 1
Write a function to find out whether a linked list is cyclic
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