A recruiter contacted me on LinkedIn, and I decided to give it a try. The application process consists of a phone interview round, then a video call, and finally an onsite interview. The intervals between interview rounds were unreasonably long.

The phone interview involved some simple coding questions on HackerRank and some C++ questions. The video call round was led by two individuals from London, who also asked me to write some code on HackerRank (but this time, we did not even compile the code), questions about design patterns, and some questions about my previous projects.

These rounds went pretty smoothly, and I was invited to the on-site interview. It actually consisted of three rounds: one with two team members (again, a coding problem, which caused no issues, plus questions about my design decisions and possible trade-offs in terms of algorithmic complexity), then a round with HR (non-technical questions, where I was also given a chance to ask questions), and another round with a manager (mostly questions about my previous projects). It turned out that the lead of the team to which I applied was ill, so we had to schedule another video call with him.

During this (fourth) part, the team lead asked me some tricky systems design questions, and I got the impression that I did not do very well. Then I had a talk with a member of another team, and finally, they told me that I would need another round with individuals from the New York office (this round never happened). After two weeks, I received a rejection, but the recruiter told me that I had really impressed the team, so they would recommend me to another team. I did not receive any more replies from them, except for a feedback form.

Conclusion:

Pros:

• Reasonable and relevant technical questions
• Travel expenses were covered

Cons:

• Tons of non-technical questions (useless, IMHO)
• Took a very long time (unreasonably long)
• Communication problems (e.g., a suddenly canceled round with the New York office, no reply about the other team)

Why Bloomberg? Why this particular team?

Describe the culture of software development in your company. How do you perceive the culture of software development at Bloomberg?

We have an instant messaging service. Suppose we now want to collect statistics about its usage (full message history). What technologies would you use for that? How would you make it fault-tolerant? How would this stats system affect the service itself? Which database indices would be needed for certain types of queries?