I was reached out by a recruiting company regarding an opening with Bloomberg. Since it was through a recruiting company, they were able to pass my resume to the team, who then decided on a date and time for a phone screen interview.

I personally felt the interviewer was very rude and arrogant. More than once, he tried to cut me off and was not ready to hear what I had to say. Twice, I wanted to take a different approach, and he said not to do that. I understand that he might have wanted to check my coding skills. After I coded, he got back to me saying, "Earlier, you were discussing something about HashMap. Now, you can describe it."

I knew I was not going to pass this within 15 minutes because he was not ready to listen to an explanation. In my opinion, an algorithm can be implemented with multiple time complexities. The end goal is to optimize it to the best possible time complexity. When I tried to explain, the interviewer was not ready to listen to what I was trying to say, or why I chose one data structure over another.

The interview lasted for around 50 minutes. In the last 3 minutes, he asked if I had any questions for him. I asked a few about the team and the work they do. He mentioned that he owned a part of the code. I guess arrogance comes with position and money.

The only reason I call this interviewing process negative is the way the interviewer behaved. In my opinion, there is no need to pull ranks on interviewees. In an interview, it is the interviewee who should share his ideas and describe successfully why he chose that solution or not. If the interviewer cannot put the interviewee at ease, that's okay, but at least don't raise your voice.

P.S. There are multiple websites where candidates discuss interview questions, and I checked. My answers were to the point. I also described the solution and time complexity (twice), but the interviewer kept telling me I was wrong and to assume that it was what he said.

The question was to display browser history in reverse order.

If the order of websites is bloomberg.com, bbc.com, cnn.com, bbc.com, then the display order should be:

bbc.com, cnn.com, bloomberg.com