I started my application for their 2010 financial software developer position online and a day later I was asked to send them my GPA. One day after I sent them GPA, I was asked to take an online skill test from a programming language I was most comfortable with. I picked C and took the test. The test was not very interesting and focused too much on some advanced or rarely used language features. Some problem can actually have vague answers depending on the compiler implementations. From there you can immediately find the difference from a technical company, which care more about how you will apply your knowledge on data structures and algorithms to solve the problems, instead of some tricky, un-important language features, which requires an intensive preparation even you are a seasoned developer.
After passing the skill test, I was given a phone screening. The experience was not great. I was interviewed by two people. One of them has an extremely very strong accent that I have a great difficulty understanding what she was describing. So far I have interviewed with more than 30 people and she is the only one that I have communicaton difficulty. Also, she was very un-patient and frequently cut you when you are not on the way she was expecting. Given the difficult communication, I was not expecting much after the phone interview.
After two weeks, Bloomberg unexpectedly invited me an in-house interview and I flied in after another 3 weeks. I was told my flight and hotel information just one day earlier. It gave me a feeling that they didn't really actually want me or care about me. The onsite is only composed of a round of technical interview and behavior interview. There should be a third round with a HM if the first two rounds went well. Again, the technical interview involves quite a lot of language features with C++, which I am not very good at given a strong focus on C. However, I think the technical interview was not that bad. The interviewers were quite nice and we had a very good discussion on some interesting problems. The behavior questions are quite grinding. The interviewer was very arrogant. She asked a lot why I hadn't found a job 3 months after graduation. I really feel kind of insulted and couldn't figure out what actually she was looking for there. I told her the market was very bad, but it was turning around and I was quite sure that I could get an offer in the coming month, which is true btw. Obviously she didn't care much any more at that time and we started to wrap up very quickly.
In general, the whole process gave me a very bad feeling and I would say bloomberg is definitely not the company I would want to work for. It is not because they turned me down. It is not a technical company that you can expect to learn a lot from a technical aspect and obviously they do not respect the technical team much.
