Couple of Bloomberg internal recruiter contacted me, and eventually one of them hooked me up with an online mini project on Hackerrank that tests your design/coding skills. Once I submitted the code, I didnt hear back from the recruiter for few days. I sent an email to the recruiter, who eventually scheduled me for a phone interview. Interviewer was very nice, knowledgeable, and appreciative of the fact that other engineers might have a different approach of solving a problem other than the one he is 'tuned' with. We went through the code I submitted, and optimized it. He seemed happy and I eventually got contacted for an onsite interview. During the onsite interview, first pair of interviewers gave me a simple linked list problem, i solved the problem however, not as fast as he expected one should be able to solve it. A 3rd person joined the room in the middle and watched me write code on Hackerneck. Three pairs of eyers staring at me while you are writing code made me nervous even when I was trying to write a very simple function. The person who joined late asked "does this code even complile?". I did mistake in calculating time complexity, I think I lost concentration. 2nd question (a java dev dude) was even simpler. The 2nd pair of interviewers didn't give me any coding problem, but asked me questions about projects i did, how I solved certain problem etc. After that two bloomberg employees and another candidate and I went to lunch (I didnt know that lunch was part of the interview). The girl from HR later told me, lunch is a way to assess if candidate is culturally fit. That makes sense. After lunch, another new pair of interviewer first gave me some code that didnt complie, and asked me to fix it. I added a copy constructor that solved the issue. One of that pair then gave me a 8 queen problem (I vaguely remember these key words from my undergraduate algo class). I took the brute force route, telling him that, once I find a brute force solution, I'll try to find a more optimal solution. However, the interviewer seemed impatient and very 'fixated' with the solution he already knows (which is handle one row or column at a time). He didn't seem very pleased with my performance, and then in 10 mins, girl from the HR showed up and said that was the end of interview and it was no brainer, interview got cut short. I felt that questions asked at Bloomberg are not that hard to solve under normal circumstances, but the pairs of interviewers (specially if they are not that Senior) might terrify you with their long faces and being too fixed with the solution they know, and they don't seemed to be very skilled or interested in learning about a candidate's through process , rather interested in how well you memorize a problem you solved in the past or prepared with. All the interviewers were very young. Statistically the senior an interviewer is, the better I do in the interviews. Pleasing junior or mid level engineers are the toughest phase in the interview process.