I applied through a recruiter. The process took 1+ week. I interviewed at Bloomberg (New York, NY)
Interview
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.
Interview questions [1]
Question 1
The C++ questions where straight forward covering design patterns, data structures, and algorithms, include big-O notation for various data structure procedures and performance of sorting techniques. Writing code on a paper is not traditionally how code is authored so you might want to practice, especially as the paper is collected afterwards.
Terrible communication. Got passed between 3 different recruiters all of whom gave specific dates for updates and blew past them. Descriptions of what would be covered in the interviews are wholly inaccurate (don’t bother reading the PDF they sent to “prep” you, almost none of it came up in any of the 3 interviews I did with them.)
Interviewers themselves were decent but clearly had exact “right” answers they were looking for. What’s the point of a leetcode question where there’s only one way to implement it? What’s the point of a system design interview where you’re having a candidate parse through a complex system that they clearly already know everything about and are just looking for 1-2 EXACT modifications to check off their boxes? Was there even a right answer? I genuinely don’t know what this company was looking for. Waste of time, waste of effort, waste of resources. Avoid, avoid, avoid
Interviewed with two separate teams. Coding rounds. Leet code style question. The interview went on for 1 hr. Waiting for the next steps. The seem to like link lists and arrays