181–190 of 278 posts
"You need to send us a handwritten page that we'll send to a graphologer in Switzerland. Nobody is hired without a graphological report." I did that, got hired, and wouldn't comply again. First job after university. Nothing bad happened. Years later I could read the report, and it was nothing remarkable.
I once was interviewing for an internship at a quant firm in Chicago (I was in my Sophomore year I think at UIUC) and my interview went pretty well up to the point of my second-last interview of the day. Then, I sat down with the VP of engineering, and he opened the interview with "so, what do you think it is we do here?" And I naturally stuttered through a canned answer about how they use arbitrage opportunities in…
I asked this exact question ("what is the net benefit of currency arbitrage") and nobody has been able to articulate is. Stock markets, I can see- they existed and exist to share risk and profit. But shorting and arbitrage, it's much harder for me to understand those. (and yes, that VP was a sociopath)
Robber Baron Capitalist comes in and says "hey wait a minute, there's money to be made!"
He starts buying goods in A, then selling them in B.
This is a very, very stupid idea, your 5 year old could have it. So that means as soon as Business A figures it out, B , D, E, and F aren't far behind.
The net for people in Market B is that now they don't pay the previous scarce price, but something closer to Market As, and more people can afford the good. This means that someone does all the work of building out all that logistics for us, simply to exploit the price differential.
Years ago I was interviewing for a software engineering role. At the end of one of the interviews I asked how they liked working there. And the interviewer caught me off-guard with "it kind of sucks". She went on to explain that the company recently promoted a bunch of youngsters into VP roles through a combination of nepotism and early start dates, and they didn't know what they were doing. I thanked her and politel…
If "promotes people to upper management who don't deserve it" was a disqualifier then you would be left with exactly zero companies to work for. Ultimately you have to be able to tell whether it's a systemic problem or just one disgruntled employee.
They’re just people like everyone else, subject to the same psychological failings as anyone.
Giving people a lot of power over other people might just be a recipe for disaster.
Of course I’ve met some compelling leaders and I’ve seen them replaced with total fools so maybe there are people who are better at it than others. (Eric Schmidt springs to mind as an example of the former and Sundar whatever his name is an example of the latter) Maybe it’s just hard to tell the difference. Or maybe our selection process is flawed.
This was before the first, codility level interview.
I should have spotted it but didn't: They took me out skiing one day between interviews (they were courting me pretty hard, and good snow was a selling point for the region) and I met the CEO for the first time on the slopes. He wore a full motorcycle-style helmet with a mirrored face visor which he refused to open; it was like talking to a member of Daft Punk. It had fake hologram bullet-holes on it. More importantl…
That's almost worth naming names, just to prevent anyone else from suffering a similar fate. Plus, I'm really curious who it was.
Back in 2014, I was an intern at a major tech company doing software testing for $13.25/hr. I was about to finish my CS degree and my internship was ending, so I was applying for software engineering jobs. During a phone screen at one company, they asked my salary expectations, and I said $60K. They asked what I was currently making, and I (naively) answered the $13.25/hr. They said they could do $16/hr, and that I s…
I remember he asked me if I was married and/or if I had kids. According to him, they needed people who are "committed" with the company and people without responsibilities are more likely to leave the company if they don't like it there.
This question caught me off guard and I just answered. By that time I was young and single, but I somehow managed to defend that I was committed and so on... Later, when the interview finished I noticed I should have stopped the process immediately, I wasn't desperate or anything like that I don't know why I continued. I guess they needed people who have no choice but to keep working due to the shit show the company was and I decided to ignore the offer. They tried to call me twice but I didn't answered. I bet I dodged a bullet.