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Comment by bbgtoreuters | Hacker News Reader

This is the same BBG where the huge hairball of C++ wrapped around C wrapped around Fortran makes up the crustry codebase? Where the interview process is still shitty pointer and char array questions? Where they implement their own borked version of the STL? Does anyone internally follow Lakos's books there? (if so or if not, why?)

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My interview at BB involved zero shitty pointer and character array questions. It was challenging but included virtually no trivia whatsoever. And that was in 2004.

I agree, the interviews I did with them recently didn't involve pointer/char array questions. Most of the questions were a lot more interesting compared to interviews I had with other companies at the time.

Disclosure: I start at BBG in June.

Do you remember any questions? I'm going to be applying there soon and I'd like to know.

My interview at BB actually was 90% about pointers and character arrays, 10% about the keyword static in C. I got the job worked a great 3-4 years there. Also, that was 13 (!) years ago.

My interview in 2003 was mostly legit, though one senior manager's 30-minute segment was all BS of exactly this nature. (His initials were GJ and in the four and a half years I worked there, I discovered he was the closest real-world embodiment of the Dilbert pointy-haired boss I've ever encountered)

The most memorable part was:

GJ: Name three examples of defensive programming.

Me: I'm sorry, I'm not familiar with the term; could you define it?

GJ: You know, defensive programming.

Me: I've not heard the term, but maybe I know it by a different name; could you describe it?

GJ: No, let's move on.

Later, I looked it up. He just meant things like `if (p == NULL) return False;`. I knew the concept well, and could've spoken about it intelligently and effortlessly, except I had never heard that particular name for it.

Oh, I just remembered another exchange between us:

GJ: What's the difference between a segmentation fault and a bus error?

Me: [perfect explanation]

GJ, seeming disappointed that he hadn't stumped me: Oh, someone already asked you this, huh?

Me: No, I know this, because once when I was in college--

GJ: Come on, you looked this up before, didn't you?

I wasn't sure how to respond -- I mean, yes, technically I did look it up, once upon a time. How the hell else would I know, derivation from basic axioms?

Anyway, I got the job, but I wouldn't be surprised if this other person was interviewed by the same guy and it left a bad taste in their mouth, too. As a senior manager, he probably interviewed 500 candidates a year.

Not GJ, but yes, a senior manager who asked similar questions. The getting angry at the answer bit is interesting - I gave an answer to one question that was obviously even better than the canned answer he was expecting, he actively ground his teeth a moment or two, like he was being shown up in front of the junior colleague, and at first refused to discuss the question until I pressed the point.

I have friends still working at BBG, so I get to hear the current interview stories, and it seems things have not really improved.

My favorite BBG anecdote was when I was on the hiring side. I rated a candidate "hire at top priority" but he was rejected by another manager.

When I asked why, the manager told me it was because the candidate wrote "xml" on his resume and not "XML" and that any knowledgable programmer would know to capitalize it correctly so he clearly didn't know his stuff.

</seriously>

This only happened because he wrote his resume in Emacs or vi. A real programmer would have used MS-Word and it would have autocorrected.

Haha, that’s incredible :)

I didn't know a programmer is expected to have "XML" (or "xml" on his cv). It's something that you can pick up very quickly if you don't know it.

Let's all chime in with Bloomberg interview experiences! My experience included two timed online tests full of "shitty pointer and array" (and C++ constructor initialization order and C undefined behavior and...) questions and two phone screens of the same before they brought me onsite.

The onsite interviews were 10% system design, 10% more "shitty C++" questions, 20% actual coding, 20% analytical puzzles ("you have two eggs and a skyscraper...") and 40% grilling on networks, such as enumerating all the error codes that socket system calls can return. While I've written tons of low level networking code, I didn't have the depth of networking experience they sought. (And I didn't do well on the analytical puzzles.) It was an interesting challenge though, and my only complaint was the job description didn't indicate what they really wanted.

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