I applied through a recruiter. The process took 1 week. I interviewed at Bloomberg (New York, NY) in Oct 2014
Interview
It was phone first then onsite. The phone interview I got some binary search problem. As for the onsite one I got some really bad interviewers for the onsite round, asked about 50 misc questions. Such as tell me all the sorting algorithms you know of, tell me all the functions you know that does locking in multithreading in java ... There was no whiteboard, so I have 2 guys trying to look at what I write down on a piece of paper in front of me through out the interview. I patiently went through it knowing I wouldn't want to work with them.
Interview questions [1]
Question 1
Give me a list of all the sorting algorthims you know of.
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