I applied through a staffing agency. I interviewed at Bloomberg (Londres, Inglaterra) in Aug 2017
Interview
Two phone interviews, then a F2F round. Phone interviews included hackerrank coding. I was impressed by the F2F interview, which lasted 5 hours and included one hour of coding and code review, 3 hours of discussing my background and matching mine and their expectations and a 1-hour HR interview. All interviewers were positive and friendly, everyone in the office was relaxed (not that I expected). Definitely a positive experience. Had to refuse the offer right now, but that was a good option to consider.
Interview questions [1]
Question 1
Hackerrank coding. Not about balancing a binary tree, more technical and useful.
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