Brief info about me:
Status: 1st year CS Student
Experience: No experience but some side-projects
Preface
I actually applied through careers website on December 17, 2021 and I receieved an email after 2 days from recruiter and scheduled my phone interview to 30th of December, 2021. But on 30th of December, 2021, my interview was postponed to January 10 because my interviews got ill.
Phone Interview
Date: January 10th, 2022
Interviewer: Software Engineer at Bloomberg for the past 5 years
Interviewer greeted and started talking about himself and little bit about Bloomberg. And then, he asked me 2 non-technical questions:
- Tell me about your experience
- Why Bloomberg
I talked about my experience and my side-projects and then I talked about why I want to do an intership at Bloomberg.
And then I had the following problem:
I solved it with O(1) Time and O(n) Space
But what I did wrong was that I explained the brute-force solution first and then coded it. After writing the brute-force solution and then he asked me if I can optimize my solution and then I optimized the Time complexity from O(n) time to O(1) and he really liked my appraoch as he constantly kept telling me that he liked my appraoch as I was explaining my appraoch but the problem was that I immediately coded the brute-force solution instead of offering optimal solution, that's why, it took me 35 minutes solving the problem and then we talked about Time and Space Complexities and I asked some questions about Bloomberg. After that, we concluded the interview but as soon as the interview is finished, I bet that I did wrong by taking time to explain the brute-force solution and coding it.
On the next day, I got an email from recruiter that I have been rejected.
So I learned my lesson and hope you won't make the same mistake just like me.