I applied online. The process took 5 days. I interviewed at Bloomberg (New York, NY) in Oct 2016
Interview
Brief description of my work experience followed by 2 coding questions using hackerrank to share screen. Syntax not a factor - interviewer just wanted to see the algorithm.
I coded as fast as I could, stumbled slightly, corrected myself quickly. I even presented a recursive and completely correct solution to one of the problems. It was obvious the interviewer wasn't prepared for an out-of-the-box answer, and as such had difficulty articulating his canned followup question.
Despite the pressure of coding while holding a phone in one hand and a laptop in the other, I felt confident with my performance and enjoyed the interview (I don't say this about all interviews). 3-days later I received an email that they were not moving forward with the application. Felt like punching a wall after that.
Interview questions [1]
Question 1
Given a matrix of integers and a starting point, find all adjacent neighbors with same value, and repeat process with each identified neighbor.
I applied through a recruiter. The process took 1 week. I interviewed at Bloomberg in Feb 2018
Interview
60 Minute phone interview on hackerrank. Interviewer dove directly into programming questions that were vague and offered little explanation as to what he was looking for. Some of the questions didn't make sense and the interviewer didn't clarify anything. After the interview ended I got ghosted (no follow up at all). I found the whole experience to be very unprofessional.
I applied through a recruiter. The process took 4 weeks. I interviewed at Bloomberg in Feb 2017
Interview
Applied through a recruiting firm (who to their credit were quite efficient)
First phone round went decently. Questions related to copy constructor and another algorithmic question. I thought my answer on the copy constructor wasn't upto the mark.
Was elated when I got a call for a second phone interview
Was much better prepared during this interview .
Question 1 : Remove duplicate elements in a linked list
Ans : Breezed through this as any developer worth his salt would
Question 2 : Compare two binary trees and return if they are equal.
Ans : Suggested a very acceptable solution where we traverse through the trees inorder and store them in vectors, and compare the vectors to check for equivalence. Was quizzed on that.
Summary : Both programs were accurate solutions and the programs worked on Hackerrank without a hitch. However second one was probably not the 100% efficient result they were looking for.
Result :REJECTED.
Interview questions [1]
Question 1
copy constructor
check if 2 binary trees are equal
remove duplicate nodes in a linked list