The process took 3 weeks. I interviewed at Bloomberg in Sep 2018
Interview
I applied through a recruiter, they scheduled a telephonic interview in a week. The interview has three parts, about the resume (10-12 min), coding (45 min) and any questions about the company (5 min). The coding part is not hard. However, they are still in old C++ style and the interviewer did not understand C++ 11 syntax (like the new for loop, auto, shared_ptr etc) and when I asked him if I should write using old C++ he asked me not to. However, it is a little frustrating to hear that they are not taking advantage of the new language feature. During the interview, he gave me an impression that he was very happy with my coding and told me that he is happy with my performance. We had a nice discussion as we develop the program. I completed both questions up to his satisfaction, but after a week I got the response from my recruiter that even though they thought that I am a strong candidate, my skill set doesn’t match with the requirement. It was a surprise to me as I am working on the same field using C++ for 19 years, but still, my skill set does not match with their requirement. Maybe he was not happy when I started using new C++ language features.
Interview questions [3]
Question 1
Compress a string using a number of the repeated character followed by the actual character. For example, aaassbd should be converted tp 3a2s1b1d.
Matrix multiplication (3X3 to 1X3). I forgot the actual logic, but I quickly picked up the logic and wrote the program once he explained the basic logic with a simple example.
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