I applied online. The process took 6 weeks. I interviewed at Bloomberg (New York, NY) in Jan 2024
Interview
One recruiter call, standard questions about your motivation and situation.
One technical phone screen for 1 hour with 1-2 coding questions.
The onsite interview with 3-4 rounds. One coding round with 1-2 questions. One system design round. And a manager round if you do well enough before. There will be another session with a leadership person if you pass.
Overall a fair process, coding can seem intense because you will try to solve sometimes 2 questions in 45 minutes. But no trick questions. System design is pretty standard, but I do recommend studying upon proven solutions to common problems.
Interview questions [1]
Question 1
Design a real-time chat application with one-one chat and group chat functionalities. Seamlessly scalable and fault tolerant. Real-time delivery and persist messages required.
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