I applied through a recruiter. The process took 3 weeks. I interviewed at Bloomberg (New York, NY) in Jun 2014
Interview
Recruiter submitted my resume for two groups. There was one phone and two face to face interviews per group. In each round I was asked to write code. Concepts and questions asked were basic but they would mostly keep grilling on same question a lot changing the problem statement a little here and there. I would advise candidates to go through basic concepts of C++, and be prepared to write code which is almost accurate on syntax and logic, like implementing smart pointers. And be prepared on whatever is mentioned on resume, projects and specific technical challenges faced. A few times the challenges I mentioned were turned into coding questions too. All in all, I dont think Bloomberg C++ interview is too difficult to prepare for, I wasnt asked complex puzzles checking how out-of-the-box can i think, they seem to be concerned if u can code or not, not if u r a code guru.
Interview questions [1]
Question 1
The one question i could not code properly: 'write a class for implementing big numbers, really big, which cant be stored in built in types, and all operations involving numbers.' I did write something but it did not look efficient enough.
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