RejectedSSE at BloomBerg
- Difficulty
- Process took
- 6+ Weeks
- Rounds
- 3
- Format
- Hybrid
- Applied via
- Company Website
How it went
Based on my interaction with interviewers, they seemed onboard with my solutions, so rejection was not expected from my side.
- May be a learning is, work towards completing your solutions, even if interviewer is not pursuant for it, Dont assume that he is fine with partial working solution.
- In system design, I jumped directly to Kafka solution and interviewer asked me if I have used kafka before. Not sure if that came across as a red flag.
What they would tell you
Based on my interaction with interviewers, they seemed onboard with my solutions, so rejection was not expected from my side.
- May be a learning is, work towards completing your solutions, even if interviewer is not pursuant for it, Dont assume that he is fine with partial working solution.
- In system design, I jumped directly to Kafka solution and interviewer asked me if I have used kafka before. Not sure if that came across as a red flag.
How to prepare
- Solve Bloomberg tagged problems. All questions were pretty standard. Nothing was off bit.
Their background
I have 10 + years experience as backend software developer. Out of that 6+ years is one of the MANGs. 2 + in a startup and 2 in Thoughtworks.
Round by round
- 1
Phone Screening60 min
Hackerrank 2 questions -
- Given list of integers, find the ones with power of 2. Used bit manipulation here.
- Bus routes - List of stops along lines is given and write a method to give if path exists between source to destination. I did BFS along bus lines and it worked. Was able to solve both the problems. Did not hear almost for a month about result.
- 2
Coding followup60 min
Two programming questions were asked -
- Browser history - Given list of links that are accessed on browser, write a function that prints browser history. This is pretty standard problem and I solved it using LRU cache.
- Candy crush 1D - Given strings like - "AABBBC", crush all consecutive candies with more than or equal to 3. eg - AABBBC -> AAC, AABBBACCAC -> "". First B would be crushed, then A and then C. I could not solve this properly. I tried to solve this using 2 pointers approach . I think using stacks is better.
Take away - Dont rush to solve the problem, identify pattern properly.
- 3
System Design60 min
I was asked to desing telemetry service that gets applications logs from different applications and raises alarms if 'critical' , 'error' or 'warning' words are found in logs in configured time and more than configured number of times.
What came up
A candidate-reported account, lightly edited. Interview processes change by team and date.
Sources
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