I applied online. I interviewed at Bloomberg (London, England) in Feb 2023
Interview
It started with an HR call and that followed by a technical interview. Technical interview was a traditional data structures & algorithms interview. Follow-up question required to improve the performance. The code written in interview should should compile successfully since it's compiled and tested at the end of the interview. Didn't get any feedback about my performance later.
Interview questions [1]
Question 1
Given an 2D matrix, find the matrix cell with the maximum number of matrix cells that can be travelled from that cell. You can only move right, left, up and down. You can move until you reach an end of the matrix or an obstacle. Obstacles are stated as 'X', free cells are empty.
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