Bloomberg Software Developer interview questions

A very easy phone screen followed by an onsite interview in NYC. There were about 15 interviewees on the super day. We began with a tour in the Bloomberg Tower (learn about their terminal, TV station, etc.), and then the 2 on 1 interview. There are two rounds of technical interview. The questions are all quite unusual, basically one of my interviewers did not prepare any questions, simply thinking of things to ask me when I'm talking. All very interesting questions, but a bit challenging -- not tricky, but kind of vague and hard to explain. I already knew at the time that I didn't do well. The people I met during the entire process were all super nice and friendly. The experience was good overall.

Don't apply to this company if you have more than 5 years of experience building software systems as you won't be asked a single question on the Technologies you have learnt or you knowledge of those. It is a great company however for people who have recently graduated with Computer Science degree and all the tricky algorithm questions that you never use in the real world are still fresh in your mind. You must memorize the big O time complexity of all the data structures and some 500 common algorithm questions on Leetcode. I also recommend consolidating all the questions people have mentioned on glassdoor for Software Engineer role and practicing them thoroughly. The interview process consisted of a Hackerrank interview that lasted an hour. I was asked questions already available on Leetcode(find the longest substring with unique characters, find the list of nodes matching a given value in a tree by doing any tree traversal) and some basic programming questions in Java around static, exceptions, collections etc. After that I was invited for an onsite. I had 2 Technical rounds with each round containing 2 interviewers. First round had both of them asking me briefly about my current role and then they asked me to write code on a computer for identifying prime numbers in a range(check Leetcode and memorize the answer that improves performance) and finding hashcode of a long value(check for bit shifting technique on stackoverflow). They also asked me some questions on Java 8 features which I don't think they were interested in knowing the answer as I don't believe they ever used it. Second round had one interviewer asking me to write code on a simple problem requiring sorting a collection using an attribute(I used Treeset and implemented a comparator). Interviewer then asked me what if I changed the Treeset to a Heap to get first k elements and what will be the time complexity of the code. Answer is nlogk. The other interviewer asked me a design question that required processing a large number of files and extracting data from them. I was also asked a simple SQL question that one can answer by doing a regular groupBy and having clause of find count(*)>10.After that I was let go which pretty much made it clear to me that I was rejected. If you are not proceeding to another round(with HR or a hiring manager) after the first 2 rounds, you are most definitely rejected. Overall, I felt that their office is great with quality free snacks and people seemed to like what they did.Interviewers will not give you any hint whether you are doing good or bad.However as I mentioned earlier, it is not a place that will ask you your knowledge of specific technologies(REST, Angular, Caching, Load Balancing, Spring, BigData etc). Part of this could be that they already have a stable product and most of the time, they are working on adding optimizations to existing product without any significant rewrite using new technologies.