Both positive and negative experience is welcome. Include the company name as well. Since phone interviews are matter of perspectives, let's see how we viewed and how different was it from the perspective of the interviewer. I will start
Glassdoor called, they want you to write a review.
Bloomberg called and said " Don't even bother. Our glass door page is already filled with such reviews"
I recently did about 10 phone. made onsite for 9 of them. For 6-7, I felt really good and I was right. 2-3, I wasn’t sure. One interview I thought went really bad but still got to onsite. After 100+ interviews as interviewer, I think I am relatively well calibrated for phone screens where ur main goal is to solve the problem given (conoared to onsite where other things are looked at). In terms of interview experience itself, companies that hire for a pool (FB, Goog, TS) had more generic, dry style where those who hire for specific team felt more personable, but can also mean interviewers could be a bit too subjective.
Impressive success rate! Seems like being on the other side of the table helped a lot. Can you please provide some insights on how to ace it? What should be the expectation? Directly arrive at optimal solution? If failed to arrive at optimal solution, does it mean direct reject?
Just to share my perspective... I think being an interviewer helps a lot especially because for most problems, I understand what types of solutions expected and in what time. Obviously can’t share details, but many problems we use share these expectations (for avg candidate, I expect this solution, etc...). Usually though if u can take hints and relatively quickly develop a solution expected, u are ok. Not taking hints, not asking for it or still stuck usually send neg signal.
Phone interview at Bloomberg. The interviewer didn't have patience at all."Tell me about this project"... While I am giving information about the business problem which the project solved, cuts off and asks questions without any understanding of what the project was, while answering those questions, cuts off and asks what others on the project did. Gives me 3 paragraph programming question and within 2 mins while I read, interrupts and says that I should read the 2nd case to understand better! While solving programming challenge, after one approached worked and when I begin to optimize, cuts off and says "its fine since I see where the optimization is heading " and moves on to other questions. All the time I wanted to scream "please stop interrupting and listen to me for a minute". It just seems like he already made up his mind before the call and was in hurry to get this thing over with
Had in campus interview with Bloomberg. One of the worst people ever to work with. They don't belong to tech space.