I applied online. I interviewed at Bloomberg (New York, NY) in Jan 2021
Interview
I had a phone interview with Bloomberg L.P. beginning of January. The interviewer was really nice, she explained the code challenge perfectly, unfortunately i couldn't finish it for the given time.
The code challenge I had was Candy Crush 1D.
I got my rejection email 5 days after.
Interview questions [1]
Question 1
Q: Write an algorithm to solve Candy Crush on one dimensional axis.
I applied through an employee referral. I interviewed at Bloomberg
Interview
For the technical 1st round, there were two engineers there. One wasn't very focused and was clearly doing his work during the interview. The other one told me she'd only been at the company for 3 months (even though Bloomberg's own policy requires interviewers to be there for at least a year).
2nd interviewer asked me an n-ary tree least common ancestor question, then after I gave an O(n) solution, told me that runtime wasn't fast enough. I was confused for a while because that is the fastest possible runtime for LCA, and spent 10 minutes thinking about how to do this in O(log n). After that, she tells me I had control to modify the tree nodes. She was clearly inexperienced at interviewing because withholding important information like that but expecting the interviewee to guess that is very unprofessional.
Other interviewer asked me Meeting Rooms II with only 10 minutes left. Clearly you'd only get it if you'd seen the problem before.
This interview doesn't test your problem solving ability -- it tests whether you can guess what the interviewer is thinking and whether you can memorize leetcode problems.
Interview questions [1]
Question 1
Least Common Ancestor, Linked List Intersection, Meeting Rooms II
Phone screen to 2 technical onsites. Took a span of 3 - 4 months with 1 - 2 months before each interview session. Coding similar to leetcode medium type of questions. Very fair in the questions they ask