I applied through a recruiter. The process took 4 weeks. I interviewed at Bloomberg (Londen, Engeland) in Sep 2012
Interview
There are 5 stages of interview. First one was telephonic interview. It was purely technical - c++, databases, unix. Next stage was face to face interview. Second interview was f2f and purely technical which lasted 2 hrs. At the beginning of this interview, I was told that whether I have more interviews or not will depend on how I fair in this interview. Second f2f was with the manager of team which lasted 45 minutes. It was totally CV based. Third f2f was with HR, it also lasted one hour and consisted of typical HR type questions and CV based questions, it was almost repetition of second f2f. Last stage was telephonic interview with NY team. I have really bad experience with this interview. The interview was arranged for 10 PM on a Friday night and the interviewer did not call. It was rearranged for Monday night. Even then, he did not apologise for not calling on Friday. Also, the way he started the interview it seemed he had really made up his mind not to take it. Asked me a very vague scenario based question and when I asked questions he replied u have to decide that for everything and finished the interview abruptly.
First round was with HR, who were helpful and transparent around details including process, salary range and job expectations. Had a second-round technical screen for one hour. Started with questions around experience followed by a coding problem. I found it challenging but the interviewers were polite, helpful and fair. Unfortunately did not make it through to the virtual onsite, but the process was fair and appropriate to the 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