I applied through a recruiter. The process took 3 weeks. I interviewed at Bloomberg (Austin, TX) in Sep 2013
Interview
I met Bloomberg at my college's career fair, where I was asked a technical question (given a string and a dictionary, find all anagrams in that string). I gave them a terrible answer, but they took my resume. A few days later, I got an email asking me to sign up for an interview. This was a standard technical interview - they asked me three questions that covered everything from C-style strings to hashing functions - and at the end, they asked me to come back in a few hours. The second interview was also technical, but considerably more high-level - they asked me two questions, one in which I had to create a string using a certain pattern and then test my algorithm, and one in which I had to implement my own circularly linked list class to solve a certain problem (see below). They asked me to come back the next morning. The third interview was a half-technical, half-behavioral interview, which was interesting. In the technical interview, the interviewer asked me to create a program to encode a series of characters using a certain encoding standard and solve a problem. The behavioral interview was a breeze - just a few questions about how I had heard of Bloomberg, why I decided to interview with them, etc. Less than a week later, I got a call with their offer!
Interview questions [1]
Question 1
Halloween has just happened, and all of the kids in the neighborhood have candy. 5 of them are standing in a circle comparing stashes, when one of them (kid 0) gets the idea to steal his neighbor's (kid 1's) candy. Kid 1 gets upset and runs away crying. Kid 2 sees kid 0 stealing from kid 1, thinks that he could do that too, and steals kid 3's candy. Kid 4 sees kid 2, and steals from kid 0, and so on and so forth until there's only one kid left. Given n children, find the index of the last kid remaining.
The first round is a phone interview that takes 45 min. After several days I got the email saying that I wad invited to the on site interview in New York. There were two interviewers this time.
I applied online, and few days after, the HR email me to schedule a phone interview date with the interviewer, the first scheduled time nothing happen, so I scheduled another time, then the next time, the phone call came as expected, they only ask me some very simple questions such as what's the difference between java and C++, most of time I talking about my project which the interviewer seems interested in on it too.
All seem going smoothly, however, two weeks later, I was told that the position was already filled.
Interview questions [1]
Question 1
How the difference of C++ and java reflects on my project.