Bloomberg L.P. Interview Questions & Reviews

Interview Details – I met Bloomberg recruiters at the career fair and dropped my resume. I spoke to them for 5-6 minutes but wasn't sure if they liked me or not. They called me the same day and scheduled an interview for the following day at my school campus. The interview was a 45 minute technical interview led by 2 mid-level employees. I stumbled a lot but they seemed to like me. I got a call back the same day to schedule another interview for the next day. It was another 45 minute technical interview led by other 2 mid-level employees. I did really well in this interview and I was called back the same day again to schedule the final interview for the following week (again on my school campus).
The final interview was suppose to be 45 minutes of behavioral interview and a 45 minute technical interview. The behavioral interview was with an HR person and it was very short, it only took 15 minutes. Then the technical interview was led by a high level employee. The questions were difficult, I failed to give the correct answer but the interviewer seemed to like my thinking process. I was told that they would get back to me in a week and I was offered a job a week later. I was given three weeks to make my decision. They also flew me out to visit Bloomberg before I had to make my decision. Their offer was by far the best offer I received, so I accepted the job offer.

Negotiation Details – There was no negotiation.

Interview Details – The first step was a phone interview with a pair of developers. Without any background or introduction, the interview proceeded for ~40 minute on technical questions on C++/Linux.

The second round was onsite with 4 different sessions: 2 technical, 1 HR, and 1 the senior manager. The technical interviews were with a pair of developers/team leads and some code was expected to be written on a provided pad of paper.

Reason for Declining – Salary was not as competitive.

Interview Details – I handed in my resume at a career fair and I also submitted my resume to the Bloomberg website. A Bloomberg employee called me 3 or so weeks later to set up an on-campus interview the next day. There were two 1-hour interviews, each interview was 2-on-1. Questions were standard interview questions; there were some brain teasers as well.

Fast forward a month later, and I get an e-mail from HR asking to set up an on-site interview. The on-site interview is really nice. They pay for your hotel and plane/bus ticket and everything. On the day of the on-site interview, an upper-level software guy (manager?) interviewed me for an hour and asked some logical questions. These *aren't* your typical programming interview questions, you have to explain your thought process and talk your way through to the answer. I think I did pretty well in this part, the guy was really nice. 15 minutes later, I thought I would get another technical interview, but instead this was the behavioral interview by an HR rep, which caught me completely off-guard. The only question she asked was "Do you have any more questions?", which didn't make sense to me at the time because I had asked all my questions to the manager before. I could only muster a "Is this the last interview?" and "What's the next step in the interview process?" The whole interview probably took 5 minutes, after which the HR rep promptly led me to the elevator.

I got a rejection e-mail a week and a half later. I think it was the HR behavioral interview that did me in, because I feel like I finished the manager interview on a good note. In any case, I would recommend 1) dressing sharp, and 2) preparing to ask and answer some HR questions, even if you think it's stupid. In any case, I had a great experience going through the full interview circuit.

Interview Details – I had a phone interview and an in-person interview; both were fairly straight forward and didn't include any brain teasers

Interview Details – phone interview: 45 mins

You have a string which stores a number with commas. For example, a string that has the number 345,000,000. How will you manipulate this string in-place [without using any extra memory] so that the output is the original string without any commas in O(n) ?

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 – Met them in campus career fair at first. The recruiters went directly into technical questions when you hand over your resume. Passed this resume screening and was arranged on-campus technical interview. Got two rounds in a row. All typical bloomberg style questions. There should be another round on campus but the manager was delayed by storms in NYC. Flied to NYC instead. Final round was also a 1:1 interview with a R&D manager. NO technical questions! Some kind of brain teasers or problem solving skills test. It was fully unexpected to me. I mistook it as a technical one and faced some language barriers since I was quite nervous then. In short I screwed it up. Received the reject email after a week. One more to mention, the accommodation is quite generous, they got a nice building and all the interviewers are so nice even when I made some silly mistakes.

Interview Details – University recruiting - Got interview call at career fair.

Interview Details – Got a call for an online application as well as through college career website. Both 2:1 interviews.

Interview 1:
Couple of behavioral questions-
Q. What would you bring to the table?
Q. Why Bloomberg LP?
Q. How are you interested being from non-CSE?
1. Linear search. Then asked for a better technique. Asked to write for binary search.
2. Cube given - Find number of cubes on the edges. (eg, for a 3x3 cube = 20). Mathematical formula.
3. Don't remember.

Interview 2:
1. Find and print a given substring in a given string.
2. Traverse a spirally decreasing path through a 2D matrix.

..for the NY positions.