I applied online. I interviewed at Bloomberg (New York, NY) in Apr 2017
Interview
I applied online, got a phone interview and after that, I was invited to an on-site interview. The interview was supposed to start at 10:30 am, however, it started at 11:05 am. It started with a tour of their [amazing] building. The tour mainly consists of the name of celebrities who have visited Bloomberg or lived in the penthouse on top of their building. Then I had two interviews.
The first one was with three software engineers, very nice people. The second one was with two other software engineers who were not very fluent in English. I could hardly understand them.
The questions were basic graph/tree traversal and string manipulation questions. Interviewers were not very knowledgeable. I solved a question with DFS and the interviewer was insisting that BFS is a better approach for a very specific example (which he was right, but only for that specific example. On average both have the same run-time). There was a question I was trying to solve with dynamic programming and the interviewer couldn't understand the solution, He asked me to write the solution recursively.
After both interviews were done, I was told to wait for the recruiter. She came back 40 minutes later.
In general very negative experience.
Interview questions [1]
Question 1
Compare Python and Java, Why Python is slower compared to C.
How to check a tree is a binary search tree?
Phone screen went very well, i passed to the onsites and they gave me the problem statement and i proposed a sub-optimal solution. They told to me come up with more optimal solution and didn't give me much time to think about it. They got impatient and gave me a hint. I figured it out and solved the problem, but apparently they thought I needed hints, which I didn't ask for.
15 minutes talking about resume, 45 minutes for 2 medium leetcode style coding questions (using code share), the interviewer was very friendly and communication is even more important than passing all test cases.
Overall, it was a positive and professional interview experience, though the interviewer was on the stricter side. Unfortunately, I was dealing with an illness and wasn't able to prepare as thoroughly as I wanted to, which left me feeling a bit off throughout the conversation. Despite not feeling my best and facing a tough interviewer, the process was well-structured.
Software Engineer applicants have rated the interview process at Bloomberg with 3.1 out of 5 (where 5 is the highest level of difficulty) and assessed their interview experience as 53% positive. To compare, the company-average is 54.8% positive. This is according to Glassdoor user ratings.
Candidates applying for Software Engineer roles take an average of 22 days to get hired, when considering 1,458 user submitted interviews for this role. To compare, the hiring process at Bloomberg overall takes an average of 23 days.
Common stages of the interview process at Bloomberg as a Software Engineer according to 1,458 Glassdoor interviews include:
Phone interview: 33%
One on one interview: 22%
Skills test: 17%
Group panel interview: 10%
Presentation: 9%
Background check: 3%
IQ intelligence test: 2%
Personality test: 2%
Other: 2%
Drug test: 1%
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