I applied through a recruiter. The process took 1 day. I interviewed at Bloomberg (New York, NY) in May 2012
Interview
I had interview with them at least 10 to 12 times over the years and they are the worst ones to interview with. They as all these low level compiler questions and if you answer one question right they dig deeper into how the compiler works and all the features of the Language usually C++. Most all this information is just rote academic knowledge which has very little commercial value but they expect you to know it.
The last interview the some of the questions did not make any sense and when I looked them up it confirmed that he did not know what he was asking. I would forget talking to Bloomberg. I is a wast of time and if you get past the telephone interview and they bring you in then will ask more of these rote knowledge questions of you.
They hire very few people and I was almost never impressed with talking to the people who did the interviewing. They did not seem to have a clue about the applications they are working on and could not follow anything when I described what I had done in the past to design systems that did similar thing to what they were suppose to be working on.
The place is also filled with almost all H-1Bs so most Americans will not have a chance of getting in there.
Interview questions [1]
Question 1
What happens when a constructor fails. And then what happens when a distructor fails.
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