Bloomberg L.P. Financial Software Developer Interview Questions & Reviews

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 – 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 at Senior year at the career fair. They called me after 2 weeks and invited me to New York and had interview and I was offered.

Interview Details – Phone Interview

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.

Interview Details – Basic algorithm questions, linked list, find prime numbers, number of zeros in the end of n!. Need to code with paper and pencil. Not very hard comparing to other IT companies.
Object oriented design problem. Not hard, just apply the ood principle and proper design patterns.
Many behavior question such as why bloomberg, what is 5yrs goal, 10yrs goal, how to be a leader.

Interview Details – Applied through the website. Interview process consists of 4 stages. First an online assessment test, then two interviews and one on site interview. Mostly mind teasers until the on site interview

Interview Details – I applied online and got an email from a recruiter for scheduling a phone interview. The telephonic interview was not very hard, basic C and C++ concepts like

1) The difference between struct, union and class
2) malloc vs new
3) what does malloc return when it cannot allocate memory?

After a week or so, I was asked to come to their NYC office for an onsite interview. Bloomberg has interview days and on every such day they have around 18-25 candidates for interviews. My interview panel consisted of 3 members, 1 was a shadow interviewer and other 2 were the one's who were actually doing the interviewing.

The interview was not very hard. I had a coding question on string reversal. Another one was on data structures and you should absolutely know which data structure is to be used in what situation along with the complexities for each of the operations. If you don't, then you have slim chances of answering such questions. My last question was the hardest one and required databases and multithreading combined together to form the solution. The interviewer had sort of mugged that question and had come for the interview. When I asked her to explain a little bit more, she kept on saying the same things again and again. Finally, the other interviewer had to intercept, reinterpret that question, confirm his understanding with the other interviewer and then had to explain it again to me.

Overall, it was a very bad experience. The culture is not very good and you can actually sense it from the interviewers' attitude. One of my interviewers was all the time texting on his cellphone when I was given a chance to ask them questions. That was pretty rude.

Warning - Check out the culture from someone inside that you know before you join!

Interview Details – Three rounds. Two technical and 1 HR.
Questions: Clear a linked list, all possible sets of n moves that an elephant can make in a chess board, calling overridden (virtual) method from a constructor in C++
Find lowest common ancestor in BST, Return kth largest element in a BST, Two containers each of size 30 ml and 50 ml volumes. How to measure 40 ml in the 50 ml container.