Applied through careers portal on Bloomberg website around end of August. Got an email from the recruiter on the day of my University's career fair after about 15-20 days.
Scheduled an interview 2 weeks from then.
On the day of the interview -
I joined in the Hackerrank code editor, turned on my video. Interviewer turned 5 minutes late and called me on my cell later. Interview started 10 minutes late.
He did not introduce himself and straight up jumped to my resume. I could not see the interviewer as he did not turn on his video.
After telling him about one of my projects, he copy-pasted the interview question.
Question was to delete a node from BST, given the key and return the updated key in its place. He used the term 'root' in the question which was not the correct term.
Anyway, he was not expecting compiled code - asked me to draw up the solution and he wants to see my logic behind.
I had seen the question that morning itself so I was pretty confident in answering it.
I walked through the various cases and wrote the code for it, was stuck at a point. Solved it after he gave me a hint. In the end he asked me for the time complexity of the code.
2 days later - I missed the reject email which arrived today morning as it was stuck in my other inbox. I checked the careers portal and saw a 'No longer being considered for this role' message on my application status. Cool down period - 6 months.
Takeaways - From my personal experience, I get a bad intuition when the interviewer turns up late. Also, I feel the interviewer was not good at communicating. I was making sure to speak my mind the whole time - and make sure he is also invested but lacked the same reciprocation from his side. This is an objective observation and I do not mean to say that I did the best in the interview without room for errors.
Question for fellow international students - I am thinking of applying to the top tier companies only after the election now since the situation looks very dicey right now with the whole COVID and Presidential election in town. What are your thoughts regarding this?
ETA: Location: NYC