← Interview experiences
Rejected

SSE 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. 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. 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. 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

Medium HardHybrid5+ years

A candidate-reported account, lightly edited. Interview processes change by team and date.

Sources