I applied online. The process took 4 weeks. I interviewed at Bloomberg (New York, NY) in Jan 2025
Interview
A recruiter reached out over on LinkedIn and I applied.
The screening round was held in 1st week of December, it had 2 questions didn't feel they were too difficult just very long questions, the interviewer was nice and the key is to communicate and explain before diving into the problem.
Got a call the next day to schedule onsite interviews, one good thing they schedule onsite on 2 different days and if day 1 doesn't go well they cancel the 2nd day's interview which is a time saver to be honest.
For virtual onsite day 1 was asked a question on graph gave a brute force or what i could think of initially with some observations required a hint from the interviewer took the hint and explained the optimized approach and coded it.
the 2nd interview on Day 1 was system design around the key is to talk more and start from a basic system rather than going for something extravagant. They focussed on the rest endpoints and Database schema and how to optimize the searching in the system.
Got an email from the recruiter the next day that the interviewers were pleased and they wanted to continue with the 2nd day's interview.
The 2nd day interview was with senior manager and team lead which was behavioral didn't know what went wrong but a rejection email from the recruiter the next day stating at this time doesn't feel like a match based on my skillset.
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