Bloomberg L.P. Interview Questions & Reviews

Interview Details – I submit resume on career fair, and scheduled an interview one week later on campus.
They asked very detailed C++ questions. gave me A{}, and asked questions for this empty class for more than half an hour. questions about constructor, destructor, pointers, everything you could imagine. and the gave me a coding problem, how to decide a tree is a binary tree or not. after coding , asked another question, what about the structure is not a tree, would my code work? we discuss this for 20 mins. the process is so terrible, kept asking questions, so basic, detail questions, no algorithm, no datastructure.
And got rej email two weeks later.

Interview Details – Applied online after finding job listing on Linkedin. Received an email about 12 hours after I applied and was scheduled for a phone interview. Phone interview was very at ease and casual questions, more based on interests, why this job appealed to you etc. Was told that I will be passed on to Hiring Manager and that we will keep in touch. Contacted them 2 weeks after phone interview to find out progress, was told that there are many candidates and they are still reviewing applications. Didn't hear back for a month and they never replied to my other communication attempts.

Interview Details – Very basic questions. Why Bloomberg, why this position, etc.

Interview Details – Very long interview process met with 9 people

Interview Details – The phone interview was mundane and consisted of typical Data Structures and tell me about your projects type of questions, one good question was to when does the compiler necessarily not make a function marked inline as inline. I was also asked a puzzle.

Was invited for the onsite interview, had my interviewed scheduled at 12:00 pm. Started the interview at around 12:05 pm, the first few questions where the general tell me about yourself and your projects. Then asked me about multithreading and problems associated with it, then asked about when deadlocks would occur. Difference between Semaphores and Mutex, by this time there where two interviewers, one shadow, one fairly senior, enter third interviewer at 12:13-12:15 pm, again, tell me about yourself etc.. The new interviewer asked me how to find the square root of a number without using the square root function, I knew the solution, he however asked me return the closest integer, so I was trying to figure that out, wrote a little code and he suddenly tells that's okay and asks me to write a test utility function for the sqrt function, i.e given a number and a possible guess please return if its actually the sqrt of the number, fair enough, it would just be a simple if else statement once we have used our sqrt function previously written. He had this you-are-wrong kind of face on, I was really worried and got all tensed. In hindsight, I guess he just expected me not to use the sqrt function and return true/false using just the utility function, I feel slightly flustered now, mainly because he could have just asked me that, it was neither a trick question nor a question that required a lot of thought. Anyways, now the senior interviewer asks me how to find if two lists intersect, I explained it to him (the answer is in CareerCup I guess), asked him if I should write the code, he told that wouldn't be needed. Then the other interviewer asks me about String compression, and a simpler version actually, as in aaabbbaacc would be a3b3a2c2, that was simple, told him how I could do it, in the hindsight I feel I should have given a in-place solution ( not a big deal, just required him to ask me a couple of questions on it or clarify if there is an better space efficient code is possible), again, asked him if I should write the code, he says no. The time is 12:52 PM, the guy who came in late wrapped the interview telling its almost time up, I said we could go back to the sqrt function and figure out if the solution I gave would work with a little tweaks (it would work). Then they ask me if I have any questions for them, etc etc. 12:56 PM they wrap up the interview, and they ask me to wait in the room, 15 mins later the recruiter comes in and tells me that they wouldn't continue with the interview. I felt shattered, I did not expect it at all, I did answer their questions. What was depressing was that they judged my performance on a single round of interview, I would have been okay if I actually performed bad, but my performance definitely warranted at-least may be another round to judge me, it was surely not soo off-mark that I had to be sent off immediately. Definitely this was one of the worst interviews I've faced, mainly because their perception of you is that you are a bad candidate and the interview is focused on assuring themselves that you are indeed bad rather than trying to get the best of you assuming you are actually good. Another evident problem I could see was that they just don't care, why?, because the interviews are basically general, once you've finished your training you need to again find a team that is wiling to accept you, since the interviews are general and they know that you may or may not be a part of their team, they don't care losing you. The i-don't-care attitude was so evident when I saw the guy came in late + he yawned in between the interview.

The post probably makes you feel that I may be sore loser trying to vent my opinions here, I can assure you I am not, I've gotten over the interview and just wanted to give you guys a big heads-up for your interviews.

Interview Details – after submitting a resume, then got an email for a phone interview

Interview Details – Phone Interview

Interview Details – Not sure if I got a call due to submission of resume online, or career fair. Both things happened more than a month ago. So I got an email for setting up of a telephonic interview, where I told my availability for next week. Next week I got another email asking for availability again for week after that, and a date/time was finalized.

Interview Details – Posted my resume and cover letter through their website. Got an phone interview three weeks later.

The phone interview lasted about 50 minutes. Questions include some details about underlying in JVM and C++.

Did not expect them to ask questions on Java, because they seem not working with Java.

And he asked me some other very very easy questions on array. HOWEVER, I could not understand his accent. Even though I repeated his question twice to him, he said yes, I still misunderstood what he meant.