A recruiter contacted me, and we scheduled a phone interview. The first phone interview went well, so they set up another one since I am not local. The position was in NY.

The second interviewer wasn't too bad, but he really pushed me to code in Java, a language I don't have expertise in. I had to push back for him to let me write code in C++. I suspect he wasn't an expert in C++ himself. He asked me to write a thread-safe singleton pattern class. I wrote one in C++ (with a static Singleton object with lazy initialization). I explained why I chose static and discussed C++11 guarantees. He then asked why C++11 guarantees that, which made me think he probably didn't have much C++ experience.

He asked me two questions. I solved the first one, but I struggled with the second because I couldn't recall the syntax for Win32 multi-threading APIs (CreateThread, WaitForMultipleObjects, etc.). The interviewer tried to help, but it wasn't enough.

In summary, the first interview focused on C++ and algorithms. The second interview was unexpectedly supposed to be more about Java and exclusively about multi-threading.

The second interviewer sounded like a nice guy, but I believe he lacked experience conducting phone interviews. This was evident because:

1. He wasn't open to hearing my ideas about the solution, possibly due to his limited C++ knowledge.
2. He insisted on me coding in Java. I switched the language on HackerRank to C++, but he switched it back to Java. I switched it back to C++ and informed him that Java wouldn't work. That's when I realized I wouldn't receive a recommendation for an on-site round. He didn't even let me ask any questions at the end; how immature.

If I had been offered a further interview, I would likely have declined the opportunity. After several years of experience, I've learned that business is fundamentally about people. If you can't work with them or if it's difficult to do so, you probably don't want to engage in business with them. It's that simple.

Good luck, Bloomberg!

Interview 1:

• Easy C++ questions covering virtual functions, inheritance, etc. The conversation lasted about 20-25 minutes.
• A Binary Search Tree question, likely related to levels. The solution used recursion, and the interviewer was happy with it. The overall call lasted about 1 hour and 5 minutes, including time for my questions.

Interview 2:

• What are mutexes and semaphores?
• What is a singleton pattern, and can you write a thread-safe version?
• Write a solution for the producer-consumer problem. The producer creates 1000 objects. Five consumers consume 10 objects at a time in a round-robin fashion until all objects are consumed. This means each consumer must wait for the other four to consume their 10 objects before consuming another batch.