I applied online. The process took 2 weeks. I interviewed at Bloomberg in Dec 2014
Interview
I received an form-letter style email saying that I have been selected as a candidate for a phone interview. On the scheduled day of the interview, after preparing all night, the phone didn't ring. I gave them about 40 minutes, after which I emailed the HR lady saying that I would only be available for another 15 minutes. The following day I received a reply from HR saying that they are sorry but "the interviewer wasn't available". It would surely have been helpful if they could have let me know about that before hand. I ended up wasting the entire morning.
The interview was rescheduled and I was asked 3 standard OOP questions using Hackerrank. After that, the interviewer proceeded to ask me if I had any questions for him. After asking the standard questions, he said "OK let's move on to the next question of the technical portion", then he said "OK bye", and hung up the phone. I stood by the phone stunned at what just occurred. Thinking it was some kind of phone glitch, I looked at the Hacckerank session trying to chat with the interviewer. He proceeded to exit the session. These guys are cutthroat and don't even have the decency to end off a call properly.
To me, the interview process was very unfair as a result of what I've described above, and I don't believe I had a fair shot at the job at hand. I received an email later on in the day saying that "I'm not a good fit for the position". Companies need to realize that applicants are interviewing them as well. We aren't begging for a job, professionals applying to work there often times have more experience than the interviewers. Companies should recognize this and treat people with some respect.
I will not be applying to Bloomberg in the future, as I don't believe they are a good fit for me.
I applied through a recruiter. The process took 3 weeks. I interviewed at Bloomberg (New York, NY) in Jun 2014
Interview
Recruiter submitted my resume for two groups. There was one phone and two face to face interviews per group. In each round I was asked to write code. Concepts and questions asked were basic but they would mostly keep grilling on same question a lot changing the problem statement a little here and there. I would advise candidates to go through basic concepts of C++, and be prepared to write code which is almost accurate on syntax and logic, like implementing smart pointers. And be prepared on whatever is mentioned on resume, projects and specific technical challenges faced. A few times the challenges I mentioned were turned into coding questions too. All in all, I dont think Bloomberg C++ interview is too difficult to prepare for, I wasnt asked complex puzzles checking how out-of-the-box can i think, they seem to be concerned if u can code or not, not if u r a code guru.
Interview questions [1]
Question 1
The one question i could not code properly: 'write a class for implementing big numbers, really big, which cant be stored in built in types, and all operations involving numbers.' I did write something but it did not look efficient enough.
I applied through a recruiter. The process took 4 weeks. I interviewed at Bloomberg in Dec 2014
Interview
I interviewed with 4 different teams. All 4 had the same format- some questions about your resume/experience, interactive coding session using Hackerrank, and then time for you to ask the interviewer questions. One of the teams had a pre-requisite of a take-home Hackerrank exam. You have two days to complete it. It was actually somewhat related to that team's real-world work so that was fun. I finished it in about 6 hrs.