Bloomberg Sr Software Engineer interview questions

First conversation was with internal recruiter. Next one was coding. Coding exercise was with one of the people on the team, who presented first exercise, and then when done, second exercise. You have your choice of what language to use, but you don't get to compile nor run your solution. Evaluation is done by your interviewer to see that logic is correct. So it need not be perfect syntactically, but it needs to demonstrate that it'll arrive to correct result. You do have intellisense though. First exercise was given a list of appointments for the day with start, end times and title of appointment, return a list of contiguous busy blocks. I.e., think of it as a consultant office having appointments with clients, and you want to know when the consultant will be busy vs when the consultant can take his lunch. Second one, given a list of pairs representing CI build jobs, pair being the job and a job it depends on, return a list of jobs build order so that it doesn't violate the dependency constraints. (I was told it's okay to assume data is valid and not worry about circular dependencies or other such bad input) I got both solutions working (i.e., both, I and the interviewer, agreed that they'll work), albeit the last one with not as efficient algorithm as could've been, though I clearly stated at the beginning that I'm sure there's more efficient one, but for now I'm going with straight-forward one to have something working, and then can optimize later. We then talked about more optimal solution, and how it would work -- talked it out, but not written it. Couple of days later received rejection email and no moving to next stages.