I applied through a recruiter. First, I was asked to complete a Previsor online C++ test. This test was completely nonsensical, mostly asking about staring into some weird class inheritance hierarchy, with some printouts in their constructors/destructors, and then selecting the proper order of printouts from a list of choices.

Luckily, for approximately half of these, the code was plain text. I could copy-paste it into my editor, compile it, and run it to see the output. For other questions of this type, they went to the effort of putting the code into an image, making copy-pasting impossible. However, the code snippets were short, and I type fast, so I would re-type them and answer the same way.

I wasn't feeling like cheating. I have enough C/C++ experience to know that if I spent enough time staring at these snippets, I would get the correct answers. But I knew it was just a quick screen and not worth the effort.

Anyway, I had a phone interview scheduled after this. The guy from Bloomberg asked only C/C++ questions again. This was after an initial five-minute tirade on how great it is to work for Bloomberg. I never understood that part; it's usually part of experience interviewing for bigger companies. Do they honestly think job seekers care more about this generalist stuff than about the actual job?

This time, the questions were much more meaningful. They started with pointers and references, the differences between them, and moved towards the usage of smart pointers, their implementation, and specifically providing thread-safety in their implementation.

I know about this stuff and did very well on that part of the interview. The guy on the other side of the line was even overly enthusiastic, interrupting me often with "excellent" and "perfect." I found this rather strange, as I really consider this type of question to be basic stuff.

The phone interview concluded with the usual "expect to hear from your recruiter in a day or two. The next phase would be another phone interview, concentrating on your past work experience, and then we'd bring you for an on-site interview."

The next morning (this interview was late afternoon), I found a rejection notice in my mailbox. It was sent 10 minutes after completing this phone interview.

So, I'm pretty much puzzled. The only thing coming out of the whole experience is the impression that Bloomberg is completely schizophrenic in their recruitment process.

Update: I just got a call from my recruiter. He was told that they felt I would be a better fit for a quant analyst than a developer position. This is still rather strange, as all of my experience is in software development. My last job (spanning about a year) was quantitative finance-related, but I was still doing only software development work. Moreover, we didn't discuss that at all throughout the interview.

Various weird C++ questions on Previsor test.