I applied through a recruiter. I interviewed at Bloomberg (New York, NY) in May 2021
Interview
Resume submission, then a technical phone interview with one of the members of the team, was asked 2 Data Structures based questions - one easy and one medium leetcode questions.
The interview with team member did not go smooth. The interviewer seemed very less experienced in interviewing and was constantly rude. They were interested in seeing if I can come up with the answer they had in mind with no intention of helping or communicating. I wanted to end the interview after 20 minutes but felt it might be rude.
Interview questions [1]
Question 1
1. Given a subway system and swipes, come up with an algorithm to calculate average time between stations
2. Given a string, return the nonrepeating subsequence
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