I applied through a recruiter. The process took 4 weeks. I interviewed at Bloomberg (London, England) in Sep 2021
Interview
A call with an HR, then an easy interview with a developer. Then I was invited to the virtual onsite, broken into 5 interviews over 3 days. I was informed that if I fail any of the days they will let me know and I will not proceed to the next one.
On the 2nd day I logged to the meeting, but no one was there. After 15 minutes of waiting I wrote to the HR and he responded: oh yeah, you didn't make it to the next round, I just forgot to tell you, sorry.
I failed interviews before in my life, but it was by far the most humiliating way I was told about it. I was honestly shocked.
BTW, all of the interviewers were pretty nice and professional, although I've had some difficulties understanding their accents (I'm Russian, all of them were Indian, I assume).
Also, Bloomberg was hiring for a concrete position and not to the company in general, which always reduces the chances.
Interview questions [2]
Question 1
Q: You have 2 methods: update a hash tag (can be slow) and return top K hash tags (must be fast). How would you implement them?
Q: You have 2 words and a dictionary. You must transform the 1st word to the 2nd by changing 1 letter in the word at a time. What is a minimum number of steps in which you can get a 2nd word? All of the words in the steps must be from the dictionary.
I applied through a recruiter. The process took 1 day. I interviewed at Bloomberg (New York, NY) in Jun 2018
Interview
Applied through a recruiter. First round was telephonic. Basic core Java questions. Java multi threading questions and scenarios. There were some Java design questions. The interviewer talked about what was role about and what is expected.
I applied through a recruiter. I interviewed at Bloomberg (New York, NY) in Jul 2015
Interview
Technical phone/remote login interview . They ask you to write code . 2 tasks - 1 - a textbook algo , second specific financial industry problem. Next step - interview with 4 people , 2 sessions each with 2 people . Mostly generic algo talk, more general problems to solve, but on paper/verbal . Pushing the limits . To pass these interviews you need to prepare for a week . It goes beyond standard algorithms , for example , their expectations on a string search algorithm included Trie and the likes , and on linked lists - separate synchronization of heads and tails. Don't come to this interview thinking that you are great. Prepare.
Interview questions [1]
Question 1
one of the topics was how to design an elevator system