I really liked the Bloomberg brand and found their website very easy to use. However, the interview process was a letdown.

Interview Stages:

• First Round: Technical phone interview with an engineer on HackerRank (1 hour)
• Second Round: CV-based questions and coding test on HackerRank (1 hour)
• Third Round: Architecture drawing (1 hour)
• Fourth Round: Past experiences with Director/Manager (1 hour)

First Round: The interviewer was very easygoing. This round solely focused on a code test on HackerRank and a math-based question. The interviewer did not conduct any Q&A.

Second Round: This round focused on Q&A and a HackerRank code test closer to their day-to-day work. Throughout the interview, the interviewers appeared quite unorganized and talked over each other very often. The lead interviewer appeared annoyed for the second half due to my slow progress. I performed fairly poorly on the tech test by spending the majority of the time troubleshooting my code on HackerRank, for example, spelling mistakes and incorrect method names. I still found the interviewers' reluctance to help a bit odd on areas usually covered by an IDE. There was also a lack of briefing, and I was totally unaware we only had an hour for both Q&A and technical tests.

Third Round: In this round, I was given a blank canvas and asked to design a system. I found the two interviewers extremely helpful and easygoing. There were considerably more interactions to bounce ideas around.

Fourth Round: Initially, I was expecting an HR round with managers. It turned out to be a round with math-based questions and in-depth project discussions. I struggled on this one as I failed to articulate my speech and messed up explaining my previous projects. The lead interviewer appeared annoyed and shut himself away for the remainder of the interview.

Overall, I found Bloomberg's interview process unpleasant. I felt ill-informed throughout the process regarding time and expectations. My Bloomberg recruiter suggested to me it was intentional not to give out any information around the agenda, to see how a candidate would react under pressure.

The feedback I received was not very useful, as there were just grades and one-liners: 'Coding - junior (Wasn’t able to see the real problem)', 'Communication - medium (The explanation for his past project wasn’t clear)'.

I appreciate your time for reading this. Good luck to you all!

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