Applied online after hearing that many of my friends had received interviews. Within a week or two, I got an email requesting a phone interview.

The interviewer actually called at the wrong time, and I was unable to answer, but HR was accommodating in rescheduling the interview.

My phone interview was excellent, and the interviewer was extremely friendly and helpful. It started off with a basic Fibonacci question (Write a function that returns the largest Fibonacci number less than or equal to some input n), but he wasn't testing to see if I had basic coding skills. He wanted to see if I could analyze the various strategies I could use and the potential downsides of each. He also wanted to make sure I understood how to check for integer overflow.

Next were design problems about a hypothetical situation in which I had a constant feed of stock purchases coming in with just information on the number of shares and the price paid per share. He asked which data structure would be ideal for many scenarios (average price per share, largest transaction volume, rolling average, 10 biggest/smallest transactions, etc.) and asked for the complexity of each structure. I made a few mistakes, and he helped me through them.

Two days later, I was invited for an onsite interview (which didn't happen for a month due to the holiday break). They flew me out to NY and paid for my hotel and taxi.

It started off with a tour of Bloomberg HQ, then all the candidates split off with the first pair of interviewers. The format was pretty standard: two engineers, a notepad, and your resume. It started off with an overview of my resume, then came the programming problems.

There were:

• Two interviews with pairs of engineers
• One interview with a manager (which only had one programming problem; the rest of the time was an "intro to Bloomberg" of sorts)
• One HR personality interview

Programming questions included:

• Find the intersection point of two singly-linked lists.
• Implement shared_ptr<T> (they were checking for understanding of copy constructors, assignment, aliasing, etc.).
• Write an algorithm for a music player's shuffle function.
• Find the first unique element in an unsorted array.
• Find all pairs of elements that sum to 0 (and then all pairs that sum to N).
• The hardest one, which is listed below.

All the interviewers were nice and helpful except for one, who seemed to have it out for me. Any hints he offered were very confusing, and even after I had 95% of the solution, he continued to goad me into "doing better." It stressed me out a bit, but all the other interviewers were pleasant.

Received an offer about 1.5 weeks after the interview.

Given a list of points in the 2D xy plane, determine how many of those points can maximally exist on a line (not necessarily through the origin).

Find the line that contains the most points and return how many points are on that line.