bchad, I interviewed with Countrywide in Jan/Feb of 2006 for hedging/trading. They kept me there for 12 hours but did take me to lunch. They had a really nice cafeteria looking out over the mountains in OldTown Calabasas. They had a sushi chef. I really enjoyed it. At the end of the day, the manager brought me a real world problem to solve that I would have been doing there, and brought an entire bag of Chips Ahoy cookies for me. They had a ton of ex-Goldman and former employees from other IBanks and hedge funds there, as well as some impressive academicians, but in the department I was interviewing for, everyone was super nice. But I took another offer which turned out to be for the best. Oh that reminds me. The beginning of the interview didn’t start out that well. They had me arrive around 8 am and I had to wait in the lobby. The HR person was on vacation and there was confusion finding another person, so I didn’t get in the door until after 9 or 9:30 as I recall. I understood that. But the guy at the desk had plenty of time to chat with me as he tried to reach someone to start the interview process. I remember him asking, “Are you an a$$hole?” I said, NO! He said, “Well you should not take this job then, as most of the ppl here ARE a$$holes and will make you unhappy” or something like that. HAHAHAHAAHAHH can you imagine it! Maybe he was talking about your group.
I didn’t interview at Countrywide. By this interview, Countrywide had already gone belly up for overexposure to subprime mortgages. This guy got picked up later on by the firm I interviewed with, and so he grilled me in a most unpleasant way. But all his mathematical sophistication still didn’t keep him from assuming that mortagage defaults couldn’t be correlated. What’s the point of trying to extract every last bit of efficiency from your mathematics if you’re going to build it out of assumptions based on quicksand?
stupid Wrote: ------------------------------------------------------- > What a bad interview experience. These days, IBs > are making sure nobody wants to work for them? agreed, one stupid at a time.
bchad, good point. and to the original poster, this behavior isn’t so unusual. many people are just horrible interviewers and are not trained to deal with people. why HR doesn’t get involved in the training, I don’t know…