I applied through a recruiter. The process took 6 weeks. I interviewed at Bloomberg in Aug 2013
Interview
Bloomberg has a pretty intensive interview process. Met with two groups and both interviews lasted 3-4 hours. Met with teams of two developers at a time. Generally they probed for insights about different architectural issues and had you solve programming tasks. Interviewers looked for code to be written with pen and paper. The questions were challenging but reasonable and they were encouraging if you got stuck or missed something.
Interview questions [1]
Question 1
They asked for insights on architectures common to their environment and dealing a lot with scalability issues.
First round was with HR, who were helpful and transparent around details including process, salary range and job expectations. Had a second-round technical screen for one hour. Started with questions around experience followed by a coding problem. I found it challenging but the interviewers were polite, helpful and fair. Unfortunately did not make it through to the virtual onsite, but the process was fair and appropriate to the role.
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