I applied online and was sent an email to book a technical phone screen using HackerRank.

The interviewer was very unprofessional and evidently had absolutely no experience interviewing candidates before. It felt as though they were jumping through an "interviewing for dummies" book that they hadn't bothered to read in advance.

The quality of the phone call itself was terrible, and the interviewer's accent made understanding them even more difficult. I'm not sure why they didn't opt for using HackerRank's built-in video call functionality instead. With that being said, the interviewer's internet went out halfway through the interview, and I had to wait around 5-10 minutes for them to reconnect.

With respect to the technical aspect, the interviewer typed an input example and the result and vaguely described the problem. When I asked a simple question for clarification about something (i.e., the interviewer used a certain term when the example they gave implied they meant something else), rather than answering my question, they started praising it as an "excellent and thoughtful question" and asked me to "explain what your thought process was that led you to asking that question." Honestly, it felt like they were directly applying things they read in an interviewing book without actually understanding the context in which to apply them.

Moving forward, they wouldn't stop talking and letting me work through the problem, constantly cutting me off while I was explaining my process. At times, I'd be asked, "What's the time complexity of this?" before I'd be done explaining something. A quarter of a second after I answered something, the interviewer would jump in and say, "NO!" even though I absolutely wasn't wrong. Apparently, this "software engineer" didn't know that the sum of numbers from 1 to n is O(n^2). They seemed all too prepared to say "NO" to anything I said or did, despite seemingly not knowing what they were talking about.

Furthermore, the interviewer would often jump between asking me to continue working on the brute-force, naive solution I tried to outline initially and a better approach. A lot of what they'd tell me to do would immediately contradict something they said seconds earlier, and they'd often ask me semi-related questions or take me on pointless tangents.

To round off this travesty of an interview, the "question" period of the interview wasn't much better. Any questions I did manage to ask led to vague, long-winded, and scripted-sounding responses that sounded like advertisements and were at best half relevant to the question I asked. This is assuming I actually got to finish my thought. This interviewer would literally cut me off to "answer" my question before I even got to ask it.

How can you have such an incompetent person representing your company like this? The impression this interview gave me about Bloomberg was that you'd have to be absolutely desperate to even consider working as a Software Engineer there. I'm sure that isn't the case, but Jesus Christ, vet your interviewers, PLEASE.