The interview process had three parts.

The first part was a half-hour screen with a Bloomberg recruiter. This involved standard questions like, "Why do you want to work here?" and "Tell me about your background."

The recruiter then scheduled me for a 45-minute technical phone screen that used HackerRank for a code challenge. The code challenge came directly from "Cracking the Code Interview." I performed very well during the phone screen, so a different recruiter emailed me to schedule an onsite interview.

During the scheduling, the recruiter asked if I would prefer to write code on a whiteboard, paper, or a computer for the onsite interview, and mentioned that I could bring my own laptop. I chose to bring my own laptop. However, during the onsite interview, the interviewers had me use HackerRank on one of the Bloomberg computers. There was no terminal available to run my code, see if it worked, or test out ideas (just an FYI).

Bloomberg arranged for me to fly to New York City for the interview and paid for the flight, one night of hotel stay, and transportation to and from the airport.

The onsite interview consisted of a tour of Bloomberg and two separate one-hour technical interview panels, each with two engineers. Each of the four engineers asked me to solve a technical question. Three were classic computer science algorithms, and one was a more free-flowing design/architectural question. Some of the interviewers tried a little too hard to be helpful by steering me toward algorithm solutions, which interrupted my thought process. One engineer took so long to explain what he wanted me to do that I had almost no time to solve the problem.

I was genuinely disappointed that I did not meet with anyone from management at any point. All of my interviewers were engineers with a limited perspective on what makes a great employee. The focus of the interviews was incredibly one-dimensional. All my interviewers seemed to care about was algorithms and data structures.

My suggestions to improve this process would be to swap at least one of the five technical interviewers for someone from management who has a different perspective on what makes a great engineer.

Ultimately, I did okay during the onsite interview but did not receive a job offer. If I could do it over again, I would spend a lot more time on problems from "Cracking the Coding Interview" and any other algorithms I could find.

Write a function that finds and returns the node with the second highest value in a Binary Search Tree. Assume the BST is valid, but not necessarily complete or balanced.