I applied through a recruiter. I interviewed at Bloomberg
Easy interview
Application
I applied through a recruiter. The process took 3 weeks. I interviewed at Bloomberg
Interview
I was approached on LinkedIn by a recruiter. After initial call, they suggested 3 teams I could choose from. I chose and we proceeded.
First interview (I think it’s a phone screen round) was pretty easy. LeetCode easy array problem, and later a tree problem where you would simply use BFT or DFT with a counter.
Next they schedule a «virtual onsite». One coding interview, again easy problem with maximum simultaneous meeting to count needed meeting rooms. First I had a wrong idea, implemented it. And later the interviewer pointed out an example where my code would be incorrect. I quickly fixed it and we talked a bit more about testing etc.
This, together with the phone screen, were some really nice people I would say.
Next the same day I had a system design interview. I needed to design an alerts system that notifies users about stock price change. Taking into account that there are a lot of alerts. Honestly comparing to their coding questions this one wasn’t asked right. No text to refer to, no nothing. I was told to “not think about load” and to “draw an overview", but then the interviewers would delve into details before I was finished. On this interview I felt the strongest communication barrier.
This was also the first interview I didn’t «vibe» with an interviewer even though they supposedly were from the exact team I was interviewing for. In a couple of hours I received a rejection. Overall I’m not too beat about it, because I didn’t feel like it was the right fit at this point.
I also got a glimpse of the office in the background of some interviewers, and it looked kinda dull and not modern. Maybe just some rooms, idk.
Interview questions [1]
Question 1
Count maximum concurrent meetings to calc number of meeting rooms needed
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