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.
7
Other Senior Software Developer Interview Reviews for Bloomberg
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