I was introduced to this position via a recruiting agency, and the process followed a usual pattern: two phone screens over three weeks and an on-site interview.

Phone screens were typical C++ coding questions on the HackerRank platform, focusing on basic trees and linked data structures. I was asked simple BFS and DFS type problems.

The on-site interview was a whole other story. I started off with a tandem, tag-team, two-person interview with a few behavioral questions and somewhat brusque, affronting questions. I think they use a NYC-style shock-and-awe policy. The technical questions delved into tedious minutiae of C and C++ details, types, language quirks, stack overflow, and memory layouts. I coolly answered the graph questions on connecting the levels of a binary tree into linked lists. Then came a design question about building a ticker feed; I designed it using a message-passing system fairly easily.

My interview ended abruptly after the second round of technical questions. Bloomberg did not reimburse me for the incidentals of travel outside of the tickets. I found the whole experience strange and clearly not suited for a financial developer, culturally, especially.

Clearly, my passion for finance and inquisitiveness in their systems is somewhat lesser than they would like to hire.

Explain your passion for finance. Clearly, I said I'm interested more in building distributed systems, and the C.S. aspects of the job excited me.