I applied to Bloomberg on their careers website and emailed the recruiter who had contacted me earlier in the year when I applied for the 2022 position, in order to speed up the process.

Received an email a few days later to schedule a technical phone interview.

Phone Interview

A 1-hour interview. Twenty minutes were reserved for talking about each other, my current job, etc. The other 40 minutes were used for a coding challenge. I was asked to code a medium-level LeetCode 380 problem. Although the problem statement was a little different, the coding part was basically the same. I coded it in 35 minutes while answering questions about my code. I made a small mistake that the interviewer pointed out, and I solved it quickly. Five minutes were used for questions. I received positive feedback a few days after.

Interview #1 – Data Structures & Algorithms

The duration was 60 minutes. We used the first 15 minutes to introduce each other and ask a few questions. The interviewer asked only one behavioral question: "Why do you want to work for Bloomberg?" She then asked me LeetCode 797. I solved the question quickly, but she noticed that I used a LinkedHashSet. She became intrigued, so she asked me to design a MyLinkedHashSet class. I got to implement only the put method, and she seemed happy with the answer. Based on my design, she also asked a basic question: "How does a Binary Search Tree work?"

Received an email 30 minutes later with positive feedback. They apologized for not being able to schedule the next interview on the same day, as we had spoken, so she asked about my availability for the upcoming Mondays and Wednesdays.

Results

The rounds of interviews took place in November. I messaged the recruiter two or three times since then to ask if they had managed to schedule my interviews, always getting the same response: “We are working hard to schedule interview slots…” I know people who started interviewing in January and have already received an offer. A lot of time was wasted for nothing.

Q: LC380

Q: Code a LinkedHashSet