Bloomberg Fulltime SDE Interview Experience and Coding Challenges

TL (Team Leader) invited me to an interview on September 23rd, I submitted my application on September 23rd, and received a notification from the school for an interview on September 30th. First inter

TL (Team Leader) invited me to an interview on September 23rd, I submitted my application on September 23rd, and received a notification from the school for an interview on September 30th. First interview on October 2nd, with a super nice Chinese interviewer. She asked me to describe a part of my resume, then asked about my most challenging project, and then asked about an experience with unclear task requirements. Then came the

coding validating the number of triangles and flattening a linked list, LeetCode medium difficulty, both problems were solved instantly. The young lady excitedly invited me to come back to school the next day (I smiled and agreed, inwardly cursing, "A trip to school takes 1 hour and 30 minutes!"). On October 3rd, the second interview was with an ABC (American) guy and an American guy. They started by asking about my resume, then asked how I could improve a previous project. Then they asked about smart pointers from my resume, but I'd completely forgotten them. Then came the coding. The first question was to find the level with the most nodes in a tree and return its vertical index. I solved it instantly in 5 minutes. Then came the "catching raindrops" question, which I pretended to think about for five minutes and solved instantly. Seeing this, the American guy immediately asked me to come up with a space-o-1 solution. I inwardly groaned, realizing I'd forgotten how to write a monotonic stack, so I racked my brains and came up with a two-pointer solution. The ABC guy was very interested and kept discussing it with me. During this time, I got so excited that I realized I'd overlooked something and blurted out "oh shit."