Just came back from interview at some hedge fund for quant-y job. I was there for eight hours and everyone asked brain teasers and/or programming questions. Fuuuuuuuu…
What language(s)?
Can you give me an example?
English would be my first guess.
^Ouch bro… bre prepared for blake to Alpha dog you right now…
Blake here is my question. Tell me advantages of functional language over imperative
^^^I’m not a computer scientist CSK, I learned to program on the job. Had to look it up. We wouldn’t ask a question like that though…
Ok, here is another one… Given coins 1,5,10,25 what would be the big-Oh of program that returns optimal change for a given amount of coins?
I remember in bschool, there was this assistant prof who taught decision sciences… the guy’s shining moment was that he re-did the whole scheduling matrix of Sabina Airlines and then they went bust. The girls were crazy about him regardless.
Functional language is great for communicating what you want.
Imperative language is great for looking like you’re the boss.
Never posting in an ohai originated thread again if this is his only post…
When I was doing equity analyst interviews, they were that long. I think the third round was 8 hours, which included lunch which was another interview with two guys over BBQ. I thought that was normal.
Never posting in an ohai originated thread again if this is his only post…
I also want to hear more. Surely Ohai will deliver.
The programming questions were probably not too hard. There was an understanding that I am not a programmer, so they only asked some simple programming and algorithmic questions to confirm that I have adequate skills. One example is, given integer argument “n”, print a spiral grid of numbers. For instance, if n=5, print a matrix like this:
21 22 23 24 25
20 7 8 9 10
19 6 1 2 11
18 5 4 3 12
17 16 15 14 13
Other questions were of similar difficulty. Brain teasers were variations of weighing games, turn-based problems, and some weird “what if you are stuck in a blender” stuff but less stupid.
But mostly, they were interested in my derivatives knowledge, which is better than theirs. So they just want to confirm that I can do some math and programming stuff if needed.
Understandable. While some of those questions seem dumb, the HF is out seeking a strong ‘Intel Chip’ not a big ‘hard drive’.
Now get the offer and make us proud!
When I was going to industry events in grad school to try to find a job, I would inevitably ask some guy why he chose to work at X firm and he said he was impressed with how difficult the interview process was. That’s not a reason to work somewhere.
I feel like interviews should serve a purpose. If you met with the heads of a bunch of different groups, who were all in the position to hire you for completely separate roles, then that would be one thing. They could all tell you about the positions, etc. 8 hours worth of technical questions, unnecessary when 1 would probably suffice.
I think the issue was that companies like this don’t hire people regularly, and many of the employees are young. So, not only do they lack a fully coordinated interview process, but some of the interviewers were inexperienced in hiring; I am pretty sure at least one of the people had never interviewed anyone before.
Of course, the senior people in the process spent a lot of time defining the position and discussing my skills and career direction. They also used a lot of the time in “sales” mode, i.e. trying to convince me that it is a good firm to work in. I think the more experienced you are, the faster you can determine if you like someone from interviews and their resume.
if i had to interview folk i’d give them one hour to finish the NYTimes Crossword and a Sudoku puzzle
If you don’t know how to interview someone, giving them a puzzle to solve makes you feel like you are doing something to evaluate their capabilities, and it makes you feel like you deserve to be in an evaluating position.
Over time you realize that you get more mileage by asking them about how they’ve managed problems in the past and asking them how they might attack a typical problem that your firm encounters. You can usually tell by the depth of the answer whether someone is the real thing or not… Also, you don’t Invite people to an interview if you don’t think they can do the job, though you do want to spot check to make sure people aren’t inflating their stories excessively.
Some companies have a culture that demands that interviewers ask brain teasers (e.g. google, though someone said that they’d decided to abandon that process). I had an interviewer at one of these places say “Well, I guess I have to do this now” before asking me a brain teaser question. I thought that was more revealing than the question itself.
Everyone hate on brain teasers, but let me tell you, it is very accurate predictor of intelligence (NOT perofrmance). You might think it is irrelevant, but it is not. Just like how much you can squat is very correlate with your vertical, but not correlated with good you are at volleyball. Will some one who can’t jump high make it in pro volleyball? zero chance.
It’s an accurate predictor of intelligence, but you are assuming you have no other predictor of intelligence available. The marginal benefit of brain teasers isnt nearly as big as one would think, even more if younare trying to gauge performance.
I’m not against the use of a brain teaser or two, but the idea that every interviewer has to come up with one is excessive,
Marginally related: it’s said that Richard Feynmann would at times drop some of the great unsolved problems of physics on his final exams for grad students. The idea was that maybe a few of them would be solved because some of the students’ minds might be a bit freer and imaginative. Not sure if anything ever got solved that way, but those must have been quite some brain teasers.