Glassdoor is your free inside look at Bloomberg L.P. Senior Software Engineer interview questions and advice. All 22 interview reviews posted anonymously by Bloomberg L.P. employees and interview candidates.
Bloomberg L.P. Senior Software Engineer Interview Questions & Reviews
Getting the Interview 22 Interviews
Interview Experience 22 Ratings
Senior Software Engineer at Bloomberg L.P.
No Offer – Reviewed Feb 13, 2013
Interview Details – Phone screen followed by onsite interview with couple of FOB types. Asked all kinds of minutia about C and C++. Interviewers were very rude. I had more experience then them in various areas so they seemed to be trying to take me down a peg. Didn't get any time to ask about the role.
Interview Question – Dig up the C++ faq and memorize. That's the only way to please these types. Even then look to be disqualified if the think you might potentially get into a lead position. View Answer
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Senior Software Engineer at Bloomberg L.P.
No Offer – Interviewed in New York, NY Oct 2012 – Reviewed Jan 9, 2013
Interview Details – Couple telephone interviews - first with HR and then a tech screening. Pretty strong interview for finance technology company. Know your CS basics - even if you've been out of college for 10+ years. Big O of sorting algos, data structures (how they are implemented, etc.), what is the vtable in c++, etc.
Interview Question –
(1)
Picture a restaurant kitchen with tickets of customer’s orders which has a start time, end time of when the order was completed, and price. How would you find the longest contiguous time that tickets were processed within a given day?
Input is an unordered vector.
First sort the vector - which sort? What is different between quick/insertion/merge/etc.?
What would be your algorithm? Do you loop through the vector?
What would be the variables you store?
(2)
How would you build an index for a given book?
What data structures would you use?
What algorithms would you use?
(3)
Multithreading and deadlocks. Problems with producer-consumer models.
(4)
Big O of traversing a linked list. What algo would you use.
Answer Question
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Senior Software Engineer at Bloomberg L.P.
Accepted Offer – Interviewed in New York, NY Jul 2011 – Reviewed Oct 2, 2012
Interview Details – I had recruit firm, that really helped me to prepare for interview. Interview was pretty hard and require deep knowledge of C++.
Interview Question – I had several question not related to programming. Some kind of logical question Answer Question
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Senior Software Engineer at Bloomberg L.P.
Accepted Offer – Interviewed in New York, NY Jul 2010 – Reviewed Sep 23, 2012
Interview Details –
Interview consisted of a telephonic first round, then was flown in for in person technical rounds. Fairly run of the mill interview process. Be prepared to write code on pen and paper though for fairly straighforward problems.
Interview focused on problem solving, basic algorithms and data structures. Then a bunch of questions on c++/c#.
Interview Question – None - were fairly straight forward Answer Question
Negotiation Details – Was given a fairly low figure - I asked and was given an additional 10k base plus 5k bonus,
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Senior Software Engineer at Bloomberg L.P.
No Offer – Interviewed in New York, NY Mar 2012 – Reviewed Jul 20, 2012
Interview Details –
They ask you what language are you most comfortable with. I said C and they can screw you in C, no matter how long and how good you are at C because they have been coding in C ever since they were born. C++ or Java might be a better option. But they love C, if you can excel in C you would have good chances of advancing in the interviews.
They love lower level stuff
Interview Question – when a shell program calls some program and the program return say value 42, where is this value stored ? Give a detailed description of what happens then ? View Answer
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Senior Software Engineer at Bloomberg L.P.
No Offer – Interviewed in New York, NY May 2012 – Reviewed May 23, 2012
Interview Details –
I had interview with them at least 10 to 12 times over the years and they are the worst ones to interview with. They as all these low level compiler questions and if you answer one question right they dig deeper into how the compiler works and all the features of the Language usually C++. Most all this information is just rote academic knowledge which has very little commercial value but they expect you to know it.
The last interview the some of the questions did not make any sense and when I looked them up it confirmed that he did not know what he was asking. I would forget talking to Bloomberg. I is a wast of time and if you get past the telephone interview and they bring you in then will ask more of these rote knowledge questions of you.
They hire very few people and I was almost never impressed with talking to the people who did the interviewing. They did not seem to have a clue about the applications they are working on and could not follow anything when I described what I had done in the past to design systems that did similar thing to what they were suppose to be working on.
The place is also filled with almost all H-1Bs so most Americans will not have a chance of getting in there.
Interview Question – What happens when a constructor fails. And then what happens when a distructor fails. View Answers (2)
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Senior Software Engineer at Bloomberg L.P.
No Offer – Interviewed in New York, NY Jan 2012 – Reviewed Jan 15, 2012
Interview Details – We had a phone interview 2 weeks ago, they asked me some basic questions on C++: ctor, dtor, static, how to call c code; algorithem:big o notation, hashtable, bubble sort, DB: transaction; multithread: deadlock, race condition, mutex. And now I was still waiting for the result.
Interview Question – Write a function that performs a string reverse: Develop a two-pass, pointers only solution using a char* of the following form - void strReverse( char *s) Answer Question
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Senior Software Engineer at Bloomberg L.P.
Declined Offer – Interviewed in New York, NY Sep 2011 – Reviewed Oct 7, 2011
Interview Details – The interviews consisted entirely of technical quizzes on the computing languages I had listed on my resume, as well as a little probing about algorithms to see if I could determine the complexity of a given algorithm. Until I piped up with my own questions, there was no discussion of my applicable business domain knowledge, my career ambitions, the work environment, workday expectations, or anything else.
Interview Question – Can you tell me what a prime number is? View Answer
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Senior Software Engineer at Bloomberg L.P.
Declined Offer – Interviewed in New York, NY Apr 2010 – Reviewed Nov 15, 2010
Interview Details – 1st telephonic interview was good. The guy grilled me on CLR and C# questions.It went for around 45 mins. 2nd Round with a panel of 3 was also quite decent by industry standars. lot of design and approach questions. 3rd round with Manager was mostly about what I have done and overall architecture.4th round with HR.
Interview Question – nothing in particular. View Answer
Reason for Declining – I got a better offer for a big Investment bank
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Senior Software Engineer at Bloomberg L.P.
Accepted Offer – Interviewed in New York, NY Apr 2010 – Reviewed Apr 13, 2010
Interview Details – Got a phone interview right after my head hunter submit my resume. The phone interview mainly includes c++, basic data structure questions and a brainteaser questions. A day after the phone interview, I am scheduled for a on-site interview a week later. I was interviewed by 4 people in 2 groups. I was asked to write code in pencil for a few algorithms.The interviewers are very nice. When I get stuck with some of the questions, they gave us some hints to knock it out.
Interview Question – What is the size of an instance of empty object? Why? Answer Question
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See What Bloomberg L.P. Employees Are Saying Posted by employees
Pros: Very fast pace company. Perfect for go-getters. Salaries are competitive with good benefits. People are friendly. You interactive with many people through out the day. There is never a dull moment. Free sodas and snacks. – Full Review `
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