I applied through a staffing agency. The process took 2 weeks. I interviewed at Bloomberg in Jun 2015
Interview
Recruiter contacted me. Had a phone interview set up. First phone interview went well. So, they set up another phone interview since I am not local. The position was in NY. 2nd interviewer wasn't too bad, but he really pushed me to code in Java, while I don't have that expertise over the language. I had to kind of force him to write code in c++. I guess he wasn't an expert in c++. He asked me to write thread safe singleton pattern class. I wrote one in c++ (with static Singleton object with lazy initialization). I informed him why I selected static and explained about c++11 guarantees. He then asked me why is c++11 guaranteeing that (Really? I think he probably didn't get much of c++).
He asked me two questions. I cracked the first one and kind of slipped bad on 2nd one, because I couldn't recall the syntax for win32 multi-threading APIs (CreateThread, WaitforMultipleObjects, etc..). Interviewer tried to help me, but wasn't enough.
In short, first interview was about c++ and algorithms. While 2nd interview was supposed to be more about Java, which is kind of weird. Also, everything in 2nd interview was about multi-threading. See in questions section for the questions asked.
2nd interview sounded like a nice guy, but I think he didn't have enough experience conducting phone interviews because 1) he wasn't open to hearing my ideas about the solution (may be because he didn't know much c++). 2) he wanted me to code in java. I switched the language on hackerrank to c++, he switched it back to java. I then switched it back to c++ and just informed him that Java won't work. lol. That's when I figured out I won't get a recommendation for on-site round. He didn't even let me ask any questions at the end, how immature.
If I would have gotten a call further, I would probably have passed the opportunity, because after a few years of experience, one thing I have realized is that business is just people. If you can't work with them or if it is hard to work with them, you probably don't want to do business with them. Its that simple. Good luck Bloomberg!
Interview questions [1]
Question 1
Interview 1:
1. virtual functions, inheritance, etc..easy to answer c++ questions. Conversation was for about 20-25 minutes
2. Can't exactly recall, but it was about Binary Search Tree, pretty easy to find on the web. I think it was to do with levels in BST, I used recursion in the solution. Interviewer was happy with the solution. Overall call lasted for about 1 hour and 5 minutes including some questions I asked him.
Interview 2:
1. What is mutex, semaphore?
2. What is a singleton pattern and can you write one that is thread-safe
3. Write a consumer producer problem. Producer produces 1000 objects and there are five consumers that consume 10 objects at a time in round robin fashion until all of them are consumed. This means that if consumer 1 consumes 10 objects, it has to wait for consumer 2, 3, 4, 5 to consume 10 objects each before it can consume other 10.
Hacker rank code pair question and answer session. The interviewer did not like my answers and had his own views. Prepare well before taking interviews from this firm. They are very stiff.
Interview questions [4]
Question 1
Write complexity of each for Java:
ArrayList add , delete, remove
LinkedList add,delete, remove
HashSet add contains remove
HashMap put contains get
I applied online. The process took 6 days. I interviewed at Bloomberg (New York, NY) in Apr 2015
Interview
applied online, phone interview was a week later, used HackerRank, one question, i coded and then he escalated the problem, didnt do well as i was so nervous, interviewer didnt care about my experience or anything, just went strait to coding test which doesnt make sense for a Senior Software Engineer position where it counts more on experience based on the job description
Interview questions [1]
Question 1
was asked to write code in any language to go through array and find duplicate integers.