Application timeline:
- 9/26/2025: Found a referral and applied for the 2026 Software Engineer - New York role. The position isn't open to the public — you can only apply through a referral.
- 11/2025: Went to GHC'25, talked to a Bloomberg engineer, dropped off a paper resume, and saw them mark it up.
- 11/13/2025: Unexpectedly got the schedule-VO (virtual onsite) email — must have been picked up through GHC.
- 11/17/2025: Did VO1.
- 11/20/2025: Failed VO1.
Let me share my VO1 interview notes.
There were two interviewers: one who'd been at Bloomberg for either 10 or 20 years, and one who'd been an intern there in 2024.
Start: we introduced ourselves. I mainly talked about my 2025 summer internship experience — I think I was too nervous and didn't explain my project clearly, so they asked me to walk through it again.
Then straight into problems. One interviewer gave me a LeetCode question (the original text I wrote this from was garbled here, so I can't be sure exactly which variant it was). The other interviewer gave me a linked list question — something like connecting the even-node list and the odd-node list.
Even though I didn't pass VO1, I can still share my prep process:
- Grinded a specific tag list on LeetCode (I only had 5 days)
- Joined a Bloomberg VO WeChat group to read other people's interview write-ups and takeaways
Reflection: I feel like both of these questions were easy-to-medium level. In the last 5 minutes I asked for feedback, and the interviewer told me directly that the way I described my experience was confusing, and that I need to communicate more with the interviewer before coding. Because of this lesson, I paid extra attention to intro + communication in my later interviews (even though that's a basic skill — but maybe because it had been so long since I'd interviewed, I underestimated it...)
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