Ho presentato la mia candidatura online. La procedura ha richiesto 2 mesi. Ho sostenuto un colloquio presso Bloomberg (Londra, Inghilterra) nel mese di ago 2020
Colloquio
After applying online, I had an initial call with a recruiter and arranged (via an online booking system) a 60 minute telephone / hackerrank tech screening.
The tech screen was with a member of the team that I applied to. I was asked one larger problem that was mostly a test of basic design & data structures. I received positive feedback within a week and arranged the virtual on-site.
In the next round were two more 60 minute coding interviews with a similar format but more members from the related teams (2 per interview), and of course via video conference. There were a total of three questions of different styles with different follow up questions. I did not find any of them specifically on leetcode but they were generally a chance to demonstrate the usual algorithm & data structures knowledge like arrays, graphs, time & space complexity etc plus some basic functional concepts.
The interviewers were welcoming and helpful - in the first interview, the interviewer could see I was taking a more complicated path, and I was given some guidance toward a better option, which I followed.
At this point there is a decision on whether to proceed to the afternoon. The result was positive so I then had:
- An interview with the hiring manager
- An HR interview
- An interview with the manager of the hiring manager
After the relative stress of the morning these were actually quite relaxed interviews / conversations without any focus on behavioural questions, more about interests and projects, and how they relate to the role - but this would probably vary depending on the team and role. I also learned a lot about the team and how everything works.
Finally within a couple of days I had a shorter call with a more senior manager in New York, which again was not so much an interview as a conversation.
Overall I was very impressed with the team, the culture and the obvious passion for technology, and I was actually quite sad to eventually have to decline the offer.
(Note that the process was long, but largely this was because of my pacing out the interviews a bit, I think they are often much faster)
Domande di colloquio [1]
Domanda 1
Coding questions involving functional concepts (relevant to this particular role)
Terrible communication. Got passed between 3 different recruiters all of whom gave specific dates for updates and blew past them. Descriptions of what would be covered in the interviews are wholly inaccurate (don’t bother reading the PDF they sent to “prep” you, almost none of it came up in any of the 3 interviews I did with them.)
Interviewers themselves were decent but clearly had exact “right” answers they were looking for. What’s the point of a leetcode question where there’s only one way to implement it? What’s the point of a system design interview where you’re having a candidate parse through a complex system that they clearly already know everything about and are just looking for 1-2 EXACT modifications to check off their boxes? Was there even a right answer? I genuinely don’t know what this company was looking for. Waste of time, waste of effort, waste of resources. Avoid, avoid, avoid
Ho sostenuto un colloquio presso Bloomberg (New York, NY)
Colloquio
Interviewed with two separate teams. Coding rounds. Leet code style question. The interview went on for 1 hr. Waiting for the next steps. The seem to like link lists and arrays
Ho presentato la mia candidatura tramite un'altra fonte. Ho sostenuto un colloquio presso Bloomberg nel mese di apr 2026
Colloquio
Drawn out / repetitive / redundant, overly focused on algorithms you won't use, matches candidates with teams that don't need them.
I started interviewing with 2 teams per their process, passed one and failed the other. The team I passed with then filled their role, so they had me interview with a 3rd team but had me start over from first round. I pass this AGAIN (so, to be clear, I've passed 2 out of 3 first rounds with 3 different teams), and then they have me do 2 second round interviews.
I made clear I had a lot of client-side experience with a high degree of skill in interface engineering and client architecture. The system design interview asked me basically to "build whatsapp," which is a backend distributed architecture problem. They weren't checking that I knew how a REST api works - they wanted to know about database redundancy with sharding and partitioning and so on, interservice data format pros and cons, message broker queue latency, scaling all these backend things....like, it was not basic stuff. They clearly wanted a distributed systems expert, and of course declined to move forward with my candidacy.
With this being the final result of 5 interviews, I expressed that I felt I was matched with the wrong team and received no reply. Kind of feel like my time was wasted.
Also, a portion of people I spoke with had no personality or warmth whatsoever.