I applied through a recruiter. The process took 2 weeks. I interviewed at Bloomberg (New York, NY) in Oct 2014
Interview
Step 1. Phone interview. Std Core Java questions. Generics, erasure, recursion, GC. If you have experience as a Java programmer, there is little much you can do to mess it up unless you curse the interviewer.
Step 2. Face to Face interview. Take me thru the steps what happens when you type a URL into your browser. Load balancing. I think these went OK. Then the next was to write an algorithm to solve some continuous function. I definitely bombed that.
Anyway, I don't want to sound like a disgruntled interviewee who did not get the job. And I would have really liked to work there even though I don't really care about the location or the free chips.
But it looks like they don't really value your experience. When you code in a programming language/OS for a long time, it pretty much becomes second nature. And for a contracting position not really sure how solving a problem involving continuous functions really helps anyone. The next interviewer asked me why I wanted to work at Bloomberg Law. You can easily BS for this question (search on youtube and you will find step by step instructions). But is this really relevant for a 6 months+ contracting position? Calm down dude, tell me a problem you have and let me help you solve it. I think its best for people fresh out of school or probably 1-3 years experience. If you have tons of experience like >10 years, don't bother. The market is great and you will find a job anywhere.
My 2 cents for what its worth.
Interview questions [1]
Question 1
Something involving continuous functions and how to determine what points they cross the origin. I tuned out when the interviewer drew the x and y-axis. Really is this the kind of problem you are solving everyday? Why don't you ask me to write some algorithms that make sense.
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