I was initially contacted by a recruiter and we arranged a first technical call via phone.

The interview started with general information about the company and position. Later, you walked through your CV, highlighting any achievements. Everything went pretty smoothly at this stage. I seemed to have impressed the interviewer with some good optimizations in the past.

There were generally two or three things that some might see as red flags that occurred during the interview:

• The interviewer was mentioning languages and implementation details when referring to giving a high-level view of the infrastructure.
• The interviewer was very pushy in forcing his coding solution, instead of respecting the interviewee's approach.
• The interviewer didn't seem to understand that O(n³), O(n²), and O(n¹) are the same thing and insisted on providing the most optimized solution from the beginning.

The worst part was the technical section. I was asked to solve a technical problem (in Python for the role I applied). The problem itself is not that hard, but personally, I got a bit mixed up in the problem, and then the interviewer made it harder for me instead of helping me with hints for the existing code.

The interviewer asked me about what I had in mind and its complexity. I said O(n³) and the reason behind it. He mentioned there was a better way, so I managed to think of a better way, giving O(n²). He insisted on an O(n¹) approach, and I got a rough idea about the implementation he meant.

The problem was that I still didn't manage to get the first approach to a workable solution, and I was in some way forced to start again from the optimized solution. This just made it worse. After getting even more stuck, instead of the interviewer giving me some hints, he started micromanaging my approach, which didn't actually affect the part where I got stuck in the first place. This totally broke my thinking (and even morale) since the implementation became something that the interviewer understood but was totally different from how I would do it.

Needless to say, I didn't go further. I think the specific interviewer was quite narrow-minded, and I hope he doesn't represent the average personnel at Bloomberg.

Walk me through your CV.

Find the maximum sequence of the same letters.