The process took 1 day. I interviewed at Bloomberg (City of London, England) in Aug 2010
Interview
Got an interview arranged through a recruiter for a very good team inside of Bloomberg. Got an email saying it will take 1 hr minimum, but to allow up to 3 hours. My recruiter explained that there are 3 stages, if you get past each stage, you get the next person coming. I was interviewed by a person I will be working with, then the head of the team, then the HR -- all in the same day. You just need to be good at computers and know what you are doing and you should be fine -- they need smart people and they know when they see one. Got everything from C/C++ questions, logic questions and more. The HR person then just came to sell the company to me. I loved the interview processes, the people and I love the culture, office and all the rest the job had to offer. Got a final interview via telephone from their head office arrange (which took about 3-4 days), which had the same type of question and I had the offer the next day. It was a no-brainer for me to accept it.
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