I am a PhD student in Civil Engineering with experience in software development and quantitative modeling (statistics, operations research, machine learning).

I met the recruiting team at the career fair in my university and submitted my resume. They were hosting on-campus interviews for selected candidates in October, which I was not invited to. Shortly after, I received an email to go through a phone screen. The phone interview was delayed to mid-November due to Sandy, but it was quite easy, and I was invited to the onsite interview.

The onsite interview had 4 rounds:

• First round was a 2:1 interview. The interviewers had spent 3-6 years at the company. They asked 3 technical questions besides the usual resume questions:

  1. Reverse the order of words in a string (e.g., "I am Chinese" to "Chinese am I"). I provided a slight variant to the textbook answer. They made me check every type of input to confirm correctness.
  2. Find the intersection of two very large (10^6 elements) integer arrays. I initially proposed a hashing solution, and then they requested an in-place method. It took me 1-2 minutes to figure it out: sorting plus binary search. I believe they were quite happy at this point, as they passed me to the next round.
  3. (To fill time) Generate all combinations of a set of size n, whose elements can take k distinct values. This is akin to outputting natural numbers in base k.

• Second round was also a 2:1 interview with similar interviewers. They asked 2 technical questions:

  1. Generate the siblings of every node in a tree. I provided a native recursive method which was not even fully coded, but they found it acceptable.
  2. Generate the browsing history of a web browser in the sequence it was visited. For duplicated visits, only print the most recent occurrence. There are many ways to do this, but they wanted one with constant time complexity (except for the printing phase). They gave me many hints before I finally figured it out. This question seems original, so I will not disclose the details.

• Third round was a 1:1 interview with a senior member (15+ years at the company). He asked me motivational questions (see below) and then a regular technical question to generate anagrams.

• Last round was with 2 HR representatives who asked many soft questions to gauge my motivation and fit for the company.

I had a good feeling about all interview rounds and received an offer the next morning.

Overall, based on my interactions with those people, I think Bloomberg is a great company to work for. The biggest takeaway is that the culture of this company feels much more like a financial firm (aggressive, committed) than a typical technology firm (nerdy, innovative). You need to think carefully whether this is the kind of culture you want to be part of.

On the other hand, Bloomberg is the only major tech company I know that is willing to provide comprehensive training for non-CS students. If you want to make a career shift from an alternative science/engineering background, Bloomberg may be one of the best opportunities.

If you like programming, why didn't you go for a CS degree in college?