I applied through college or university. The process took 3 months. I interviewed at Bloomberg (New York, NY) in Dec 2016
Interview
I am a new grad and had applied on the careers page of Bloomberg website. I then received a mail after 10 days asking me to provide dates for a telephonic interview. I proposed 3-5 dates; but then did not get any response whatsoever. I mailed them again proposing 3-4 additional dates and eventually got a telephonic interview scheduled. This time though, the interviewer never called! I was already having second thoughts about working for such a company but the recruiter apologized and scheduled the telephonic for another day. Finally, I got a call.
Telephonic Interview:
The interviewer was knowledgeable. We discussed in detail about my previous work experience. He then gave a very simple programming question (the kind you would solve in the first year of your undergrad studies). He then allowed me to ask him questions and I learnt a good deal about the kind of work and the teams at Bloomberg. Within a couple of hours, I got an email inviting me for the on-site interview in New York.
On-site interview:
I had two rounds of technical interview with a 20 min break in between. On the day, 10 other students were invited for interview. We were given a brief tour of the office and then each one of us were given a snack box. We then proceeded to different conference rooms to be interviewed. Unlike many other interviews that I had attended, I had to write the code on paper instead of on whiteboard.
One of the interviewers for my first round came in late. Until then, I was discussing about the work at Bloomberg with another interviewer. We then talked briefly about my previous experience. The question was a simple 2D-Array traversal problem. The interviewer seemed to have had a very specific approach in my mind and was chipping in every now and then with questions and input even before I was fully done with writing the program. I then stopped, told them what I had in mind and how I planned to do it and then proceeded to write the code again.
The second round was similar. This time, I was asked a tree-traversal problem, every node in the tree could have arbitrary number of children. I had to decide my data structure and write a function to traverse the that tree. In this round, the interviewer seemed uninterested. Whenever, I asked a question about the nature of work and the company, the interviewer would turn defensive and provide answers in rhetorics.
Overall, the whole experience did not paint a very good picture about the company for me.
Interview questions [2]
Question 1
Given a 2D matrix, print all the elements one diagonal at a time.
Given a root of tree where every node can have arbitrary number of children, write a function which would truncate the tree to a given height and return the root. The leaf nodes of the truncated tree should have the sum of all its children as its value. Define your own data structure to represent the tree.
Overall, it was a positive and professional interview experience, though the interviewer was on the stricter side. Unfortunately, I was dealing with an illness and wasn't able to prepare as thoroughly as I wanted to, which left me feeling a bit off throughout the conversation. Despite not feeling my best and facing a tough interviewer, the process was well-structured.
Fairly simple. Phone call then onsite. For onsite it was 10 min office tour follow by 1 hr interview then 1 hours system design and 30 mins manager interview. Interviewers were nice and the recruiter was accommodating.
5 rounds first 3 being leetcode coding ones and the last 2 being behavioral. The first three are the hardest asking mainly taggeed questions and the rest are not that bad