I applied through a recruiter. The process took 3 weeks. I interviewed at Bloomberg in Sep 2022
Interview
Overall a good experience with Bloomberg interviews. They were respectful, clear, iterated quickly. Initially an in house recruiter reached out and explained the process. You do apply to a specific team, unlike to a generic office like at Google and similar. You can apply to two positions. Even though I chose different positions on the website than the recruiter suggested, she did not object and transferred me to a different recruiter. The rounds and questions were pretty standard. A standard coding interview for the first screen, and for the virtual on-site you get another coding interview, a systems design interview and a talk the with managers. They use hackerrank as platform.
Interview questions [1]
Question 1
Matrix multiplication for a very sparse large matrices
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