I applied online. The process took 2 weeks. I interviewed at Bloomberg in Jan 2025
Interview
Recruiter screen, then technical screen where I was asked LC242 (valid anagram) and solved it. Setup the virtual onsite which was 1 technical, 1 "system design" (not really), 1 manager, 1 hr screening.
So I show up to the technical interview and the interviewer asks me questions about previous projects for the first 20 minutes... Then I solved LC20 (Valid Parentheses, with a twist) and with about 18 minutes left in the interview, the interviewer just says "yea I don't feel like asking another question".... Okay?
Same thing for the system design interview, first 20 minutes are the interviewers asking questions about my previous projects. Then, the interviewer took 10 minutes (not exaggerating) to introduce the challenge which realistically could have been explained in 2 minutes. So, I was left with 30 minutes to solve the problem. I started to lay out high-level system design and the interviewers pretty much immediately wanted me to go into database design + schema. That's most of what I talked about and then it ended. They didn't seem interested in normal system design topics, they just wanted to see how you'd design the DB.
I just feel like the interviewers shouldn't be asking questions for 20 minutes in the beginning. I also think they should call the system design interview something else because it's not system design, it's DB design. Overall, was not impressed with the interviewers during the virtual onsite.
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