I applied through a staffing agency. The process took 6 days. I interviewed at Bloomberg (New York, NY) in Mar 2011
Interview
Screening through a recruiting agency over the phone, then one phone interview and a visit to NYC to be interviewed by 2 different teams of 2 people each, 3 hours with groups of 2 people, for a total of 12 people, the interview lasted all day, they paid for my plane tickets and hotel. I learned that both teams wanted me when the recruiter called me next day with the job offer.
Interview questions [1]
Question 1
One question was about auto suggestions in a browser
How threading works in different flavors of Unix
C++ question
There were more questions but I can't remember now but I will update this information in the future.
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