I received an oral offer as R & D software engineer a year before my graduation. Three months later, their recruiter gave me a phone call and reneged it, without caring or taking any responsibility of the other offers and interviews I have declined for them.
I received an oral offer over the phone after interviewing them on campus around end of Sep, 2015. Since I still have a year left in school and only taking two masters courses, I asked for a part-time intern opportunity to work in their Princeton office, mostly to get familiar with their teams and development environment. Before the intern started I told their manager about my availability constraints ( only available this semester & winter , and would take time off during exams ) and they told me it's fine and sent me an part-time intern offer letter to sign on. On the contract it says "Expected work hours per week : 10 hrs". Also, either the manager or part-time offer letter mentioned anything about its potential impact of my full-time offer.
Then I interned at a team throughout Nov.2015 - Jan.2016, worked mostly 4 days a week, averaging 25 ~ 30 hrs for the weeks I came to work. I took a whole week off during finals and another week during Christmas and New Year.
The program itself is very disorganized : No intern / new hire training, no clarification of performance expectation, no assigned project, and no desk. Yes I never had a desk assigned to me throughout the entire internship. I was told to fix bugs in their current production code and I worked closely with my mentor on daily basis. I managed to fix all the bugs they assigned to me and my code went to production.
After telling them I wouldn't be able to work part-time after my last semester starts, as we agreed upon before I start interning, I received a phone call from Bloomberg's recruiter couple weeks later said they would renege on my full-time offer. "Based on your review from your team, your technical ability has no problem, but it's the communication issue. Therefore we decided to not give you full-time offer". Later that night I called my mentor and he told me he knew what I did, he was satisfied about my performance since I was able to pick up their project and fix bugs quickly. He insisted to keep me in the team, but their team lead who never assigned anything to me or worked with me claimed I am not dedicated to the company since I took days off during final. Recruiting team did not take any responsibility of the other offers and interviews I have declined, insisted the decision is final and there's nothing I can do about it.
I talked to my friends and professional engineers who had experience with Bloomberg. This company has a terrible record of reneging people' offer / fire new employees during their recruiting process. They basically don't care about how it would effect your career as a software engineer. You are a new grad who is not experienced with employment laws / process, and they would do whatever they need as long as they think it would benefit their company. Be very careful if you are considering Bloomberg as your full-time employer, they have reneged / fired people before they join, during their new hire training, even in your first six months.
After all this is a company which would say "Technical ability is fine, but team lead doesn't like your communication " to renege an incoming engineer's offer.
