I applied online. The process took 4 weeks. I interviewed at Bloomberg in Jun 2020
Interview
I applied online on May 7th. I heard back the next day that they wanted to do a phone screen with HR. I setup that call and all went well. This was when I first noticed that the recruiter (maybe just HR person) was rude and cold. They were not like the other recruiters I've worked with in my job search process. I didn't think much of it at the time. From there I did the tech phone screen on June 3rd. I heard back on June 7th that'd I'd be moving on to the virtual onsite. I scheduled my onsite for June 17th. They were very vague about the onsite and said I could schedule a call with the person I first talked to (hr/recruiter?) to learn more. I setup the call for June 11th. They never called... this should have really been a red flag for me but I still continued... When I logged into the virtual onsite I was greeted by 2 disinterested engineers that immediately just started talking without even greeting me. Throughout the interview they just seemed disinterested in what I had to say and many times they were silent after I was done speaking. The next interview was better but one of the engineers had a bad internet connection and so I barely could understand them. At the end of that interview they said I could take a 20 minute break and that someone would join the call after that. So I take a quick break and get on the call again. I wait 5 minutes, no one showed, 15 minutes, still no one... I wait 30 minutes and still no one joined the call. I emailed the only contact I had and luckily they got back and said "Oh I'm sorry (the recruiter/hr) person was supposed to join the call but got pulled into a meeting last minute. I think you already talked to her today though so you're done for the day". I had in fact NOT talked to her yet AND she failed to show up AGAIN. So unprofessional and completely rude. I was really thinking I'd like Bloomberg as a place to work but after this experience I will never apply again. This was such an awful experience as a candidate and I think they should really look into the HR/recruiter person I was working with. I heard back 2 days after the onsite that I was rejected.
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
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
I applied through other source. I interviewed at Bloomberg in Apr 2026
Interview
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.