As a new graduate, I applied through Bloomberg's careers website. Ten days later, I received an email requesting dates for a telephonic interview. I proposed several dates, but received no response. I emailed again with additional date options and eventually secured a telephonic interview. However, the interviewer never called. Despite having reservations about the company, the recruiter apologized and rescheduled the interview. I finally received the call.

Telephonic Interview: The interviewer was knowledgeable and we discussed my previous work experience in detail. They then presented a very simple programming question, similar to what one would solve in the first year of undergraduate studies. Afterwards, I was allowed to ask questions and learned a great deal about the work and teams at Bloomberg. Within a couple of hours, I received an email inviting me for an on-site interview in New York.

On-site Interview: I participated in two technical interview rounds with a 20-minute break in between. On the day, ten other students were invited. We were given a brief office tour and each received a snack box. We then proceeded to different conference rooms for our interviews. Unlike many other interviews I had attended, I had to write the code on paper, not on a whiteboard.

During the first round, one of the interviewers arrived late. Until then, I discussed Bloomberg's work with another interviewer. We then briefly spoke about my previous experience. The question involved a simple 2D-array traversal problem. The interviewer appeared to have a very specific approach in mind and interjected with questions and input before I had fully completed writing the program. I then stopped, explained my thought process and plan, and proceeded to write the code again.

The second round was similar. This time, I was asked a tree-traversal problem where each node could have an arbitrary number of children. I had to decide on my data structure and write a function to traverse the tree. In this round, the interviewer seemed uninterested. Whenever I asked questions about the nature of work or the company, the interviewer became defensive and provided rhetorical answers.

Overall, the entire experience did not present a very good picture of the company for me.

Given a 2D matrix, print all the elements one diagonal at a time.

Given a root of a tree where every node can have an arbitrary number of children, write a function which truncates the tree to a given height and returns the root. The leaf nodes of the truncated tree should have the sum of all its children as its value. Define your own data structure to represent the tree.