I applied online. The process took 3 weeks. I interviewed at Bloomberg (New York, NY) in Sep 2024
Interview
First was a phone screening which was a vague design question where you're expected to ask questions and build up a solution; pretty simple.
Next was a virtual on-site. Starts off with a coding session where you're asked a LC question and a simple design question. Nothing difficult there.
Following that is a Design Interview, which should have been easy. My issues resulted from the fact that I wasn't allowed to think about the design holistically because the interviewers were telling me to make assumptions about miscellaneous parts being implemented, which derailed my thoughts. Then time was wasted focusing on my table structure (which I thought would have taken 5 minutes; maybe they were unaware of what functionality exists in relational databases and how you can chain stored procedure calls), never allowing me to progress to the meat of the design. Had no time to expand on any ideas, talk about separation of concerns/design any microservices, or take into account different user/client experiences, request concurrency & potential conflicts and resolutions, push/pull updates, etc. Overall poor experience with the design interview and I knew it was over from there.
It seemed to me that the interviewers have maybe never done a system design interview before? In hindsight, the problem seemed a lot less of a system design question and more of them wanting to see a simple OOP model and implementing two methods, which conflicts with what the literature sent out prior to the interview contained.
Everyone I interacted with was very pleasant and had I gotten an offer, would have definitely enjoyed working with.
Interview questions [3]
Question 1
Maze problem seeing if you can reach the end within n steps.
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