I applied online. The process took 4 months. I interviewed at Bloomberg (Londen, Engeland) in Apr 2018
Interview
The process was not smooth at all, but overall was decent.
I started by classic application on careers website. After 4 days I received an email to schedule a technical phone interview. They had to reschedule it other time due to reasons not known by me. So I rescheduled it after one week.
The interview lasted about one hour. First we discussed about my projects and got really deep into details. After that two problems.
1) Print the top 10 largest elements from integer array. Follow up to top K.
2) Given a string, rearrange it in decreasing order by the characters frequency and in lexicographical order if their frequency is equal.
After one month they invited me to an on-campus interview.
Lasted also about one hour. Again asked me about my projects and my previous work experience. Also 2 problems:
1) Given a large string (a book) and a list of words (unique words), print all occurences where all the words appear consecutively in the string. (the order does not matter, but need to be all from the list and having no other words between them).
Example:
INPUT:
string: "This is a test is. other a"
list: ["is", "a", "test"]
OUTPUT:
1,2
2) Consider the browser search where you type an URL. You need to keep track of the history and to print the most recent URLs the user searched. More or less LRU cache. Also discussed the trade-offs and time/space complexity.
After two months, they invited me to London office for the onsite.
Had only one techincal interview and one HR.
The techincal interview lasted about two hours (maybe more than 2...) and we discussed a lot about my projects and work experience and got into details. The interviewer seemed to be impressed about my work so there was just like a conversation. After that he gave me a design question about building a Custom Index Engine.
Came up really fast with a working solution but he wanted me to optimize as much as I could. So I told him where are the bottle necks and even got to multithreaded arhitecture.
This was my favorite interview and I enjoyed it very much. After that I had a HR interview where we discussed what I would like to work on, my previous work, what keeps me motivated, what I would improve, how and classic why bloomberg.
After two weeks, they called me and made me an offer for a Full Time Graduate position in London Office.
Interview questions [5]
Question 1
Print the top 10 largest elements from integer array. Follow up to top K
Given a large string (a book) and a list of words (unique words), print all occurences where all the words appear consecutively in the string. (the order does not matter, but need to be all from the list and having no other words between them).
Example:
INPUT:
string: "This is a test is. other a"
list: ["is", "a", "test"]
OUTPUT:
1,2
Consider the browser search where you type an URL. You need to keep track of the history and to print the most recent URLs the user searched. More or less LRU cache.
I applied through college or university. The process took 2 days. I interviewed at Bloomberg (Buffalo, NY) in Oct 2017
Interview
October 2017.
Two interviews held on campus, on back to back days.
A brief discussion on resume projects. One coding question in the 1st round and two coding questions in the second round. Dp, DFS and graphs.
Interview questions [1]
Question 1
Round1:
Given a matrix filled with different integers and an entry point, count the number of connected points(adjacent up, down, left, right) with the same value as the entry point.
Round 2:
Box stacking problem without rotating sides. Do it using DP.
Find all paths from a source to destination in a graph.
I applied through college or university. The process took 3 months. I interviewed at Bloomberg (New York, NY) in Feb 2018
Interview
One phone screen, where the interviewer asked me 2 data structures questions. Then 4 onsite interviews, 3 technical 1 HR.
They provided me with a nice hotel near the office, and I walked to office through the lively New York city traffic. Haha.
I was there at 10:30 am. There were about a dozen more candidates from different universities, and I guess they were all for Full time Engineering role. The process started with a recruiter giving us the tour of their beautiful office. Then they gave me a 100 dollar gift card for any cab and other expenses. Then I was greeted by two engineers who took me to a private meeting room for the first face to face round. They asked me about my project, and two data structures questions. It went on for around 1 hour.
After that, another set of two engineers came in for the second round. They also started with project discussion. Then we discussed a data structures question which they kept on evolving. This round also went on for around an hour.
After that, there was an HR discussion for around 15-20 minutes. She asked me questions about why I became Software Engineer, a project in non-tech terms, top 3 things I want to see in my future employer, etc.
After that, there was a round with Engineering Manager. It was on video conference. He asked me about my resume, then went on asking system design questions. It went on for around 1 hour. This was the last round.
After everything was done, I was greeted by a different HR who escorted me out of the building and told me that my initial recruiter will be in touch in a few days.
Interview questions [1]
Question 1
Data Structure questions were similar to Leetcode medium, design questions required some architectural understanding.