Recently interviewed with Bloomberg London for senior software engineer role, sharing question and experience

Background

• YOE: 9
• Applied from bloomberg careers page

Round 1 - Phone + hackerrak

• Given flight trip details which goes from source to destination
  A to B
  B to C
  C to A
  D to X
  We need to print all paths from a given source to destination

Solved quickly using graph DFS - got email next day for a 5 hour slot for virtual onsite rounds. I scheduled in 2 weeks

I also had a interview prep call before virtual interview round and recruiter explained - you will have 2 technical rounds and then 1 hour break then if we are good with tech rounds you will talk to lead and hiring manager

Virtual onsite 1
Additive tv show: https://leetcode.com/discuss/interview-question/956995/Bloomberg-or-Phone-Interview-or-Question

This was a very puzzling question to understand - it didn't have any examples. It took me around 30 mins to understand the problem - No help from the interviewer. I said, let me try and go episode by episode and keep on calculating the percentage - he said no, we don't have to go episode by episode but eventually I solved by using going episode by episode only

After understanding the problem - I asked, shall I implement this? He said you have only 25 mins left so be quick - I did and executed with correct output in 20 mins

Virtual onsite 2

• Given working hours of various banks like
  • RBS, 09:00 to 17:00
  • Morgan Stanley, 10:00 to 16:00
  • …

We are given a time interval like 15:00 to 18:00, we need to find if we have at least one bank available which is open across a given time interval. In this example no bank is available from 17:00 to 18:00 so should return False

This was fairly straight forward, had an example also so explained the approach in the first 5 mins , they were happy with the approach and asked to implement. Had a lot of follow ups on this, I handled all and kept on updating the code as well. Interviewer seemed to be happy

Got rejection email in next 10 mins after second round

I went back and checked the first question - got the above link, other people are also not able to understand this question. Don't know what they want to test English or Aptitude or what with this confusing question, at least they should add an example

Recruiter also shared the feedback after a week and encouraged to apply after 9 months