A big thank you to LeetCode and the amazing community for the motivation, informational posts and for getting me ready for the coding interviews. I applied to Bloomberg for the Entry-Level Software Engineer position and received an offer 6 weeks later.
Preparation
I started LeetCoding 4 months before I started interviewing.
I used the tagged questions list and started with 1-2 questions a day and upped it to 3-4 a few weeks before my onsite.
I did 237 questions: 91 (Easy) | 134 (Medium) | 12 (Hard)
Phone Screen
We started with some questions about my resume:
“Describe a project you worked on.”
“What was a technical challenge that you encountered?”
The question was:
Copying List with Random Pointer
https://leetcode.com/problems/copy-list-with-random-pointer/
The last 5 minutes were set aside for questions I had for the interviewer.
After the interview I scheduled a virtual onsite a few weeks out.
Virtual Onsite
Round 1 (Technical)
I met with one interviewer. We started with some introductions and questions about my resume.
Spent 20 minutes talking about Data Structures, OOP and Threads.
The coding question was a variation of Word Break II:
https://leetcode.com/problems/word-break-ii/
I didn’t get to finish the problem.
The last 5 minutes were set aside for questions I had for the interviewer.
Round 2 (Technical)
I met with one interviewer. We started with some introductions and questions about my resume.
The first question was 1D Candy Crush, a variation of:
https://leetcode.com/problems/remove-all-adjacent-duplicates-in-string-ii/
The second question was Meeting Rooms II:
https://leetcode.com/problems/meeting-rooms-ii/
The last 5 minutes were set aside for questions I had for the interviewer.
At this point they asked me to stay online and said that someone from HR would speak with me.
Round 3 (HR)
This round was shorter than the rest, about 45 minutes.
It consisted of behavioral questions and salary expectations.
The last 5 minutes were set aside for questions I had for the interviewer.
After this round I was told to schedule time with a senior manager a week out.
Round 4 (Senior Manager)
I met with a senior manager and spoke for an hour, no coding involved.
It consisted of resume and behavioral questions as well as describing the design of a project that I worked on.
The last 5 minutes were set aside for questions I had for the interviewer.
Overall, I had a great experience; all the interviewers were very friendly and helpful, and the recruiters were fast.
Decision
I was contacted after a week and received an offer.