I applied online. I interviewed at Bloomberg in Oct 2014
Interview
I applied online and they contacted me after 3-4 weeks asking me to give various available time slots for the phone interview. They scheduled a 45 minutes phone interview.
Choosing a programming language of your choice:
How do you implement a Polynomial?
After I told them Array list, he showed me a very big polynomial and asked me what will you do if you have very big polynomial that needs to be handled? (Using an array list 'll consume hell a lot of memory for polynomials of higher degree)
I answered him that i 'll use a hashmap to store the degrees and coefficients. He seemed to be impressed with that.
How will you implement the following four functions using the hashmap/arraylist:
1. Constructor which details how your polynomial is stored
2. Adding two polynomials.
3. Printing polynomial.
4. Finding the derivative of the polynomial.
He also asked me about my prior work experience and also about my current Master's thesis project which I thought I answered well. But I was able to implement only the first two functions(using arraylist) with in the time limit. Got a rejection email with in 3 days.
Interview questions [1]
Question 1
Implement the above four polynomial functions using hashmap.
Overall, it was a positive and professional interview experience, though the interviewer was on the stricter side. Unfortunately, I was dealing with an illness and wasn't able to prepare as thoroughly as I wanted to, which left me feeling a bit off throughout the conversation. Despite not feeling my best and facing a tough interviewer, the process was well-structured.
Fairly simple. Phone call then onsite. For onsite it was 10 min office tour follow by 1 hr interview then 1 hours system design and 30 mins manager interview. Interviewers were nice and the recruiter was accommodating.
5 rounds first 3 being leetcode coding ones and the last 2 being behavioral. The first three are the hardest asking mainly taggeed questions and the rest are not that bad