Bloomberg L.P. Software Engineer Interview Questions & Reviews
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Updated May 2, 2012 – Interview questions and reviews posted anonymously by interview candidates.
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Difficulty Rating [?] Based on 61 ratings 
“Difficult” Interview
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Interview Experience [?] Based on 61 ratings
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| 41–50 of 61 Bloomberg L.P. Interviews | Sort by |
Software Engineer at Bloomberg L.P.
Posted Aug 4, 2010
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3.0
Average Interview
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Overall Positive Experience
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Interviewed and No Offer
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Interviewed May 2010 (took a day)
Got E mail from the staff agency. The employee asked about the technical questions about programming language C++. She is not a technical person. She uses a cheat sheet with a list of questions and answers. The questions were not difficult, I was told that I did not have the required experience at end of interview. The whole process lasts about 1 hour.
Interview Questions
Other Details
I got the interview through a Staffing Agency and the interview consisted of a Phone Interview.
Helpful Interview?
Yes |
No
Inappropriate?
Software Engineer at Bloomberg L.P.
Posted Jul 31, 2010
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3.0
Average Interview
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Overall Positive Experience
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Interviewed and No Offer
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Interviewed Oct 2009 (took 1 week)
why bloomberg and not othert companies like google or microsoft?The manager himself was very tough - kind of confrontational in his approach. Although turned off by this, I ended up accepting a long term contract assignment. Its a good company to work for. Summer Party is great. When you quit BLP as an employee you can -never- return.
Interview Questions
Other Details
I Applied Online and the interview consisted of a 1:1 Interview.
Helpful Interview?
Yes |
No
Inappropriate?
Software Engineer at Bloomberg L.P.
Posted Jul 29, 2010
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5.0
Very Difficult Interview
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Overall Neutral Experience
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Received and Accepted Offer
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Interviewed Jan 2008 (took a day)
Started with a good phone screen from one of the lead developers. Likable guy - good interview, went well. Subsequently invited for in-person. Building is very modern - glass walls, fishtanks, open space. Interview room itself was tiny. Basically, a little glass closet. Fine for 2 people, but somewhat awkward for me and the 5 or so people squeezed in with me. The technical interviews are pretty good - by no means easy. The manager himself was very tough - kind of confrontational in his approach. Although turned off by this, I ended up accepting a long term contract assignment. Its a good company to work for. Summer Party is great. When you quit BLP as an employee you can -never- return. At least that was the policy for years (this may have changed).
Interview Questions
Other Details
I got the interview through a Recruiter and the interview consisted of a Phone Interview and a Group/Panel Interview.
Helpful Interview?
Yes |
No
Inappropriate?
Software Engineer at Bloomberg L.P.
Posted Jul 27, 2010 — 0 of 1 people found this helpful
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3.0
Average Interview
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Overall Neutral Experience
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Interviewed and No Offer
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Interviewed Jul 2010 in London, England (United Kingdom) (took 2 weeks)
They were confused.
First they forgot to call me on scheduled time, so I had to contact guy from the agency, and then he arranged new time. Also, on the same day of that first 'missed' phone interview, I got rejection email from them, which was, obviously, a mistake.
First interview lasted some 30 minutes, and the questions were usual about C++, Unix.
I got through to second technical interview, but then I got surprised - it was some 80% the same as the first one! Same questions, same topics.. I was confused, but I answered even better than on the first interview(I read more about it after first interview). So, I was expecting to pass the second round, since I already passed the similar first round, and I did good in the second round, but then I got the rejection email.. My guess is - since I'm from outside EU, they probably judged that it would be too much for them to pay the whole thing..
Interview Questions
Other Details
The interview consisted of a Phone Interview.
Helpful Interview?
Yes |
No
Inappropriate?
Software Engineer at Bloomberg L.P.
Posted Jul 10, 2010
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5.0
Very Difficult Interview
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Overall Negative Experience
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Received and Accepted Offer
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Interviewed Jan 2009 in New York, NY (took 2 weeks)
Random stuff. Off the wall. Extreme irrelevant technical detail. It's mostly about throwing you off guard and pushing you into unfamiliar territory, to test your limits. That's because you have to tolerate being broken repeatedly in order to survive the work environment. You are expected to grovel without showing it, without making it obvious to anyone that grovelling is occurring. This is an important qualification for working at Bloomberg, since it is what you will be doing most of the time.
Interview Questions
Negotiation Details
No amount of money is large enough. Ask yourself, am I willing to die for this company? If they raise you enough to answer yes, take the job.
Other Details
The interview consisted of a Personality Test, a Skills Test, an IQ/Intelligence Test, a Group/Panel Interview, a 1:1 Interview and a Phone Interview.
Helpful Interview?
Yes |
No
Inappropriate?
Software Engineer at Bloomberg L.P.
Posted Jul 5, 2010
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3.0
Average Interview
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Overall Positive Experience
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Interviewed and No Offer
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Interviewed Jun 2010 in London, England (United Kingdom) (took a day)
After completed an online assessment test I was invited for the phone interview. All questions was technical. Interviewer began with simple C++ questions like: what does copy constructor do, what is polymorphism, what is overloading, etc and finished with a more advanced about interprocess communication and STL. The chat over the phone took about 30 minutes and was very friendly.
Other Details
I Applied Online and the interview consisted of a Phone Interview.
Helpful Interview?
Yes |
No
Inappropriate?
Software Engineer at Bloomberg L.P.
Posted Jul 1, 2010
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3.0
Average Interview
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Overall Positive Experience
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Interviewed and No Offer
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Interviewed Apr 2009 (took a day)
Sent online test to the applicant. If you are not the computer science background, they normally do not test your programming skills online, but tested the IQ and logic analysis capability. Then aggregated a group of candidates in same day, like a open house day, introduced company at NYC site and then interview each person face to face and 1:1.
Other Details
I Applied Online and the interview consisted of a Skills Test, an IQ/Intelligence Test and a 1:1 Interview.
Helpful Interview?
Yes |
No
Inappropriate?
Software Engineer at Bloomberg L.P.
Posted Jun 4, 2010 — 1 of 1 people found this helpful
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3.0
Average Interview
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Overall Negative Experience
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Interviewed and No Offer
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Interviewed May 2010 in City of London, England (United Kingdom) (took 3 days)
Applied through recruiter. First asked to complete Previsor online C++ test. This test is completely moronic, asking mostly for stuff like starring into some weird class inheritance hierarchy, with some printouts put into their constructors/destructors, and then to select proper order of printouts from the list of choices. Luckily, for approx. half of these the code is plain text, so I would just copy-paste it into my editor, compile it, and then run to see the output; for other questions of this type, they made the effort to actually put the code into an image, so it's not possible to copy-paste it, but the code snippets are short, and I type fast, thus I would re-type them, and answer the same way. I was not feeling like cheating: I have enough C/C++ experience that I know if I spend enough time starring in these snippets, that I would get correct answers, but I knew it's just quick screen and it's not worth the effort.
Anyway, I had phone interview scheduled after this. The guy from Bloomberg asked only C/C++ questions again (after initial 5 minutes tirade on how great is to work for Bloomberg; never understood that part, that is usually part of experience interviewing for bigger companies - do they honestly think that job seeker really care more about this generalist stuff than about the actual job in question?), but this time questions were much more meaningful - basically, the questions started from pointers and references, differences between these, towards usage of smart pointers, their implementation, and specifically providing for thread-safety in their implementation. I know about this stuff, and I did very well on that part of the interview; the guy on the other side of the line was even overly enthusiastic, interrupting me often with "excellent" and "perfect", which I found rather strange as I really consider this type of questions to be basic stuff. The phone interview concluded with usual "expect to hear from your recruiter in a day or two, the next phase would be another phone interview, concentrating on your past work experience, and then we'd bring you for an on-site interview". Next morning (this interview was late afternoon), I find rejection notice in my mailbox, and I can see it is sent 10 minutes after completing this phone interview. So I'm pretty much puzzled, and the only thing coming out from the whole experience is an impression that Bloomberg is completely schizophrenic in their recruitment process.
Update: just got a call from my recruiter, and he is told that they've felt I would be better fit for quant analyst than for developer position. Still rather strange, as all of my experience is in software development, it's only my last job (spanning for about a year) was quantitative finances related (but still doing software development work only); moreover, we haven't discussed that throughout the interview at all...
Interview Questions
Other Details
I got the interview through a Recruiter and the interview consisted of a Skills Test and a Phone Interview.
Helpful Interview?
Yes |
No
Inappropriate?
Software Engineer at Bloomberg L.P.
Posted Apr 12, 2010
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3.0
Average Interview
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Overall Neutral Experience
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Interviewed and No Offer
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Interviewed Sep 2009 in New York, NY (took 1 week)
I had to take an online test to get to the phone interview stage. The online test was relatively easy - very basic technical questions. The interviewers failed to call me - the first time the interview was scheduled. After re-scheduling the interview, they asked me a couple of brain teasers and probability related questions. They were not too difficult either.
Interview Questions
Other Details
I got the interview through a College or University and the interview consisted of a Phone Interview.
Helpful Interview?
Yes |
No
Inappropriate?
Software Engineer at Bloomberg L.P.
Posted Mar 17, 2010
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4.0
Difficult Interview
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Overall Negative Experience
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Interviewed and No Offer
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Interviewed Sep 2009 in New York, NY (took a day)
The interviewer asked me basic questions about Unix commands, C questions, some data structure questions like what data structure you would use to build something. Although at that time i was quite satisfied with my interview i was eventually rejected.
Interview Questions
Other Details
The interview consisted of a 1:1 Interview.
Helpful Interview?
Yes |
No
Inappropriate?
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