Applied online and was given an email asking to book a technical phone screen using Hackerrank.
The interviewer was very unprofessional and evidently had absolutely no experience interviewing candidates before. An apt description would be that it felt as though they were jumping through an "interviewing for dummies" book that they hadn't bothered to read in advance.
The quality of the phone call itself was pretty terrible and the interviewer's accent made understanding them even more difficult; I'm not sure why they didn't opt for using Hackerrank's built in video call functionality instead. With that being said, the Interviewer's internet went out halfway through the interview and I had to wait around 5-10 minutes for him to reconnect.
With respect to the technical aspect, the interviewer typed an input example and the result and vaguely described the problem. When I asked a very simple question to get clarification about something (i.e. the interviewer used certain term when the example they gave implied that they meant something else), rather than answering my question, they started praising it as an "excellent and thoughtful question" and asked me to "explain what my thought process was that led me to asking that question"... Honestly felt like they were directly applying things they read in an interviewing book without actually understanding the context in which to apply them.
Moving forward, they wouldn't stop talking and letting me work through the problem, constantly cutting me off while I was explaining my process. At times I'd be asked "what's the time complexity of this" before I'd be done explaining something, and a quarter of a second after I answer something the interviewer would jump in and say "NO!", even though I absolutely wasn't wrong... Apparently this "software engineer" didn't know that the sum of numbers from 1 to n is O(n^2). He seemed all too prepared to say "NO" to anything I said or did, despite seemingly not knowing what he was talking about.
Furthermore, the interviewer would often jump between asking me to continue working on the brute force naiive solution I tried to outline initially and a better approach. A lot of what he'd tell me to do would immediately contradict something he said seconds earlier and he'd often ask me semi-related questions or take me on pointless tangents.
To round off this travesty of an interview, the "question" period of the interview wasn't much better. Any questions I did *manage* to ask led to vague, long-winded, and scripted sounding responses that sounded like advertisements and were at best half relevant to the question I asked... and this is assuming that I actually got to finish my thought. This interviewer would literally cut me off to "answer" my question before I even got to ask a question.
How can you have such an incompetent person representing your company like this? The impression this interview gave me about Bloomberg was that you'd have to be absolutely desperate to even consider working as a Software Engineer there. I'm sure that isn't the case, but Jesus Christ, vet your interviewers, PLEASE.
