I applied through their website and received an email two weeks later asking me to schedule a technical phone interview. I replied in less than 24 hours and got an email a week later with the scheduled interview details.

The phone interview lasted 45 minutes. They first asked why I wanted to work at Bloomberg and why I was looking for a job as a software engineer. Then, they moved on to computer science questions.

Although the online description suggested that candidates might be currently taking their second computer science class, they actually expect a solid understanding of algorithms and data structures. Without this knowledge, they have little else to ask. If this is the case, they will resort to logic puzzles, such as determining the minimum number of weighings needed to find the odd coin in a set of 12, or calculating the minimum number of races required to find the three fastest horses from a group of 25, given that only five can race at a time.

They also inquired about basic definitions of various data structures and computer science terms, and asked me to write simple loops or code to find specific values. It's crucial to know the running time of methods within data types, as this is a common topic for their questions.

Asking me about the running time of algorithms I had not really coded up (on paper) but just talked about.