I applied online between Christmas and New Year of 2016. About a week later, I received an email expressing interest in scheduling a job interview. I scheduled the first interview for the end of January.

As many people here have posted about encountering issues, such as not receiving a phone call from the prospective interviewer, I experienced this too! I waited for about 15 minutes and then emailed the recruiter, informing her that I had not yet received a phone call from Bloomberg. Immediately, less than 5 minutes later, I received the call, and the interview began.

If there were a way to rate the professionalism of this company, I would give them at least a 9/10, regardless of mistakes that can happen.

The first phone interview was relatively easy and straightforward. The interviewer asked me the following questions:

• Tell me about yourself and why you are interested in Bloomberg.
• Tell me about a programming project you were involved in (choose your best one!).
• What technologies did you use for this project? (If it was web-based, don't forget the front-end, database system, and OS environment, etc.).
• The programming question: He provided an ordered list with duplicated items except for one. For example, [2,2,4,5,5] or [2,2,4,4,5]. He asked me to write a function to return the unique item. First, I used a standard approach, but then he asked me to make it more efficient, so I used a binary search mechanism to locate that item.

The next day, the recruiter contacted me to schedule the onsite interview in either NYC or Princeton, NJ, for the following week. I chose Princeton because I dislike working in highly crowded places like NYC (though I love to visit them!).

In the onsite interview, they first gave a quick tour of their building in Princeton. After that, I had an interview with one engineer, then with another.

In the first onsite interview, he asked about my preferred language and then about the data structures used in that language. The discussion evolved to talking about using binary trees for hash tables. He then asked me what I would do to balance a tree on scratch paper. The third related question was: What would be the best practice to store contact information and look them up by the first letter? (The answer is to find a hybrid between a BST and a Hashtable). The last question was to write a function that finds all rectangles given a series of points.

The next interview involved questions that I was familiar with from 5 years ago when I graduated from college, but not now! He asked me about what an OS process contains and how processes communicate with each other. Also, how process variables are stored and how the OS can retrieve them. I struggled to recall some OS concepts but could not remember everything. I did not advance to the third interview, so I knew no offer would be extended.

In general, the process was straightforward, and the interview questions are quite medium and easy if you have just graduated. However, if it has been a long time since you graduated, my advice is to do the following:

• Master "Cracking the Coding Interview."
• Review essential Operating System concepts (I suggest downloading some PPT files for easy reading).
• Review core Linux concepts and commands.

Good luck!

Write a function that finds all the rectangles given a series of points.